


Born To Be A Hammer

by sanidine



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Abusive Relationships, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Mob, Canonical Character Death, Crime, Crooked Cops, Dark Federation, Drug Use, Established Relationship, Explicit Language, F/M, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M, Mild Police Brutality, Minor Character Death, Minor Original Character(s), Murder, Past Character Death, Past Underage Sex, Poverty, Ritual Self-Mutilation, Space Mob, Star Trek Big Bang 2011, Undercover Missions, Violence, casino - Freeform, old fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-06
Updated: 2016-01-06
Packaged: 2018-05-12 05:10:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 32,939
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5653579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sanidine/pseuds/sanidine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>((Written for Star Trek Big Bang 2011)) Twenty five years after George Kirk was murdered, the colony he helped to found has succeeded. Christopher Pike, ex-governor and owner of the Enterprise Hotel and Casino, has to face the ghosts of his past and an insane Romulan out for blood. Meanwhile, Jim Kirk and those who would have crewed his starship in a better universe revolve around each other in the sprawling city, unaware of the deadly storm brewing on the horizon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part One

**Author's Note:**

> This was the first real fic I ever wrote, back for the STBB 2011. If I started editing it I don't think I'd ever stop, so I am just straight-up copying it here in all of it's original glory so it doesn't remain lost to LJ. There were so many things that made perfect sense in my head at the time, but now seem weird and out of place. Oh well, live and learn! For the record, I *think* I was going for a crime-noir vibe but it comes across as over the top scenery-chewing to me now.

_**Twenty Five Years Ago**  
  
George Kirk died with his back burning on black sand, eyes staring wide and sightless into the twin suns of Iankt Prime as they dipped below the horizon. His body convulsed and slowly went limp, his hands falling away from where they had tried to pry his assailant’s ever-tightening grip on his throat to twitch weakly on the ground. As the black static rushed in and overwhelmed his vision, George’s last thoughts were not of betrayal or fear but of hope, of Winona and his sons and the promise of the Federation.  
  
When George Kirk died, his hope died with him. _  
  
\---  
  
Once, when Jim was a child, Winona had told him that his father hadn’t believed in no-win scenarios. Jim had believed it at the time, thinking for days about what a cool guy his dad must had been, how heroic and brave. He had learnt the truth over time, as children do when the optimism of youth is stripped away by the realities of adulthood.   
  
Jim Kirk’s entire fucking life was a no-win scenario.  
  
So yeah, Jim had been speeding, but he was still surprised when the cop pulled him over. The cruiser had been parked off to the side of the road, hidden in the tall, weedy grass. He had been too preoccupied by squinting his eyes against the rising suns to see where they reflected off the red and blue of the sirens, hadn’t even have time to tap the break. Jim grit his teeth and crossed his fingers, hoping that he would be ignored. Most of the colony police rarely got off their asses for anything less than a murder. Then the hollow wail of the siren rose behind him, growing louder and louder until it was all that Jim could hear.  
  
Goddamn it. Fucking corrupt assholes.  
  
He let the siren scream at him a little longer, driving farther than was strictly necessary before pulling his cycle over to the side of the road. All of the roads on Iankt were well paved, self-regenerating asphalt paid for by the casino’s revenue, but out on the edges of the city it contrasted sharply with the general state of disrepair and decay. When Jim had been a kid the colony had still had to produce its own food, but then the spacedock had been built and agriculture had become unnecessary. There were still a few working farms, but most of the fields had gone wild with weeds, forming a patchy brown and green gradient out into the vast blackness of the desert. Dilapidated farmhouses and ruined silos jutted up like broken teeth across the gently rolling landscape, slowly rotting in the heat.  
  
His bike had been coughing for a week, and as Jim pulled over it let loose a series of noisy squeals. Great. If there was one thing that people knew about Jim Kirk, it was that his luck just did not stop. Heaving a very put-upon sigh (and really, it was a tragedy that no one was there to hear it), Jim keyed off the ignition and began the arduous process of digging his registration out of the recesses of his wallet. Faintly, he registered the sounds as the door of the cop car opened and, just as quickly, slammed shut.  
  
Jim heard the crunch of gravel as the cop approached and braced himself for some big guy with a bad attitude. He looked up with a grin that was meant to toe the line between confused and chagrined because yeah, he’d been going twice the speed limit, but Jim had talked (slept) his way out of tickets (and warrants) before. It was worth a shot at least. The expression quickly faded to one of confusion when he saw that there was nobody standing next to him. For a long, dumb second Jim just sat there, registration in hand, trying to figure out what the hell was going on.  
  
Somewhere around the vicinity of Jim’s knees, something cleared its throat.  
  
Looking up at him was the shortest cop that Jim had ever seen, humanoid but indisputably alien. The shiny brass nametag pinned on its miniature uniform read ‘Officer Keenser,’ which really wasn’t any help at all for determining gender. A “ma’am” or a “sir” never hurt when dealing with the cops, but Jim had gotten it wrong before and had the scars to prove it. Jim could handle big and burly with something to prove, but had no idea what to expect from the little goblin-like alien in front of him. Its craggy green face was etched with a deep scowl, and its eyestalks twitched minutely in their deep black sockets as Jim stared at it openly.   
  
“Where’s the fire?” It hooked its fingers through its belt loops, looking up with a very human expression of impatience, and Jim had a split second moment of clarity when he realized two things simultaneously. The first was that Officer Keenser, bizarrely enough, wasn’t wearing shoes. The second was that he was about to get shaken down.  
  
It threw him off his game even more than the appearance of the pint-sized goblin of a cop, and even though Jim had fully intended to say _’Sorry, officer’_ or something else equally banal and inoffensive, when he opened his mouth the first thing that came tumbling out was   
  
“How do you even reach the pedals?”   
  
Before he could even attempt to salvage the situation, Jim felt a bright jolt of pain in his leg. At first it felt like a bad bug bite, but before Jim could register what was happening, every single muscle in his body contracted as the electricity hit him. It felt like somebody had shoved a molten wire down his spine and tightened it, his arms involuntarily jerking in towards his body as all of his nerves went dead. He seized violently, dropping his wallet, and tumbled sideways off of the motorcycle, falling to the ground with a painful thud. If Jim would have been able to think about it he would have been glad that he had put the kickstand down, but as it was his mind was simply a jumble of _’what the fuck’_ and _’holy **shit** that hurts’_.  
  
He didn’t pass out, but coming back to himself was a slow process. Jim found that he could wiggle his toes and smack his lips against the grainy dirt that he had inhaled, but when he tried to push himself up he found that it just wasn’t going to happen – Officer Keener had taken up a perch on his back, pinning Jim belly down against the rough ground.  
  
The little fucker was _dense_.  
  
Jim groaned faintly, and Keenser let out a harsh sound that Jim took a while to process before he realized that it was supposed to be a laugh.  
  
“James Tiberius Kirk. Huh. Wasn’t your father one of the founders?” Not only was Keenser sitting on his back, it was also apparently going through Jim’s wallet. Jim made a sound that could just as easily have been a ‘fuck you’ as a ‘yes he was, now please let me up.’ Either way, Keenser didn’t seem particularly bothered.  
  
“Look at this!” Keenser sounded almost gleeful. Jim heard the faint beeping sound of a credit chip balance being checked and closed his eyes. “Where’d you get all this dough?”  
  
“Borrowed it.” It sounded like a lie, it really did, and the problem was that it was actually the truth. Jim had borrowed off everybody he knew to scrounge up the thousand credits he needed to get his bike fixed. The thousand credits that Keenser was no doubt pocketing as Jim was pinned to the ground, helpless and furious.  
  
“Yeah, I’ll bet you did.” Keenser finally stood up, letting Jim roll over onto his side and cough. “Unfortunately for you, it’s not enough to cover your speeding fine. You up for performing a little community service, Kirk?” It didn’t wait for a reply, striding back to the cop car on its little bare feet while Jim pushed himself up into a sitting position and leaned back against his bike. It wasn’t his fist time getting stunned, but that didn’t make it any better. Jim hadn’t even had time to think about how he was going to get out of his current situation before Keenser had returned.  
  
It held out a bulging manila envelope, judiciously wrapped with electrical tape. Because that wasn’t suspicious or anything.  
  
“I want you to deliver this.”  
  
Jim glared down at the little goblin as he stood up, gently massaging his arms to try and chase away the lingering vestiges of pain. “Why the fuck should I?”  
  
For Jim, it wasn’t so much a matter of doing something illegal as much as it was his resent towards being stunned, robbed, and forced to run an errand on his only day off. Sure, he had done illegal shit before – had done the time for some of it too – but he’d always gotten to choose who and what he was associated with. And from what he knew about the colony cops, Jim was sure as hell that he didn’t want to know what was in that envelope.  
  
Keenser grinned at him then, and Jim realized that the thing’s grin was somehow worse than its scowl. “’Cause if you don’t, I’ll stun you again and throw you in the lock-up. Tell ‘em I found you carrying this.” It waved the manila envelope gleefully before tossing it up at Jim, who caught it reflexively and looked down at the address that had been scrawled in between the black strands of tape.  
  
“This is all the way on the other side of town!”  
  
“So? Just get it there by two, Kirk.” Keenser’s gravelly voice was serious “If you open it I’ll find out about it, and believe me, I’ll find out where you live. You savvy, you little fuck?”  
  
Three years ago Jim would have argued the point. Three years ago he probably would have thrown the package back and mouthed off about Keenser calling _him_ little. But then Jim had done nine months on Tantalus and had learned better than to mess with the colony cops, even if they were as corrupt as a bag of rotting apples. All his father’s dreams, gone to shit. So instead he just nodded, shoved the package into the storage compartment of his cycle as Keenser walked back to the cruiser.   
  
Jim stooped to pick up his wallet and spat on the ground, trying to clear the rest of the grime from his mouth. As he had guessed, all of his credits were gone, transferred into that greedy little bastard’s pocket no doubt. The cruiser pulled past him then, bleeping the sirens briefly, and Jim shot it the middle finger as it disappeared.  
  
Not for the first time in his life, Jim found himself broke in the middle of nowhere with a vehicle stuffed with contraband. At least his day couldn’t get any worse.  
  
\---  
  
Sulu double checked the number on the stenciled on the side of the house as he pulled his cruiser to a stop next to the curb. He had gotten off the night shift an hour before but he still wore his uniform, still slipped his dark aviators into place as he climbed out of the cab of his cruiser.   
  
There was some type of ugly vehicle parked in the driveway of the small, shabby house. It looked like the bastard child of a hovercar and a truck, a grotesque amalgamation of everything that was wrong with automotive design. There was a gaudy spoiler that had been adhered crookedly to the roof complementing the masterpiece of truly hideous decals, and the open bed loaded with junk - trash bags full of clothes, a lumpy cardboard box, a cracked stool, a faded lamp.   
  
Sulu crossed his arms over his chest, sliding into cop mode as a man stormed out of the little house, carrying another box of crap in his arms and spitting curses into the dirt.   
  
The guy - _David? No, Daniel._ , his mind supplied vaguely _You were on the football team together_ \- was nothing special. Human, large in a way that spoke of softness rather than strength, a schoolyard bully who had never grown out of his childhood habits. Daniel looked like the kind of guy that had spent his adult life trying and failing to cultivate an image of intimidation – shitty tattoos, ugly flame decals on his car, poor choice in facial hair. Sulu dealt with Daniel’s type every day while on duty, men who hid their cowardice behind violence and misplaced anger. They were the same on every planet.  
  
Irritation was scrawled plainly across Daniel’s features as he let the screen door slam shut behind him. He faltered when he saw Sulu standing next to his vehicle in the driveway but, to his credit, he recovered quickly from the unexpected appearance of law enforcement, dropping another box of shitty knickknacks unceremoniously into the bed.   
  
“You got everything?” Sulu asked, keeping his face dangerous and blank, his eyes hidden behind the dark sunglasses.  
  
Grimacing, the guy actually spat on the ground before shooting a poisonous look at the house. “No. Little fucker’s still got half my stuff, but he’s not gonna let me get it without a fight.”  
  
“Cut your fucking losses, man. Time to clear out.” Sulu cocked his thumb over his shoulder and, although he wouldn’t have thought it possible, the guy’s face got even uglier. He thought for one glorious moment that the guy was actually going to lunge at him. Not easily intimidated under the worst of circumstances, a part of Sulu hoped that the guy would take a swing at him. Stunning the asshole and throwing him in the back of the squad car would have made Sulu’s day..  
  
Right before his eyes, Daniel’s face morphed from a sneer of hatred into a cocky smile. The man turned away from Sulu and wrenched open the door of the car, slamming it after him as he climbed inside and onto the cracked upholstery.   
  
Sulu had spent enough time as a cop to know when somebody was going to try to fling some witty parting words at him. He wasn’t disappointed.  
  
“So I guess you’re the one who’s fucking him now, huh?” Daniel’s tone was trying for amused and condescending but it failed to mask the bitterness in the man’s voice. Sulu was barely listening, one hand resting lightly on the butt of his phaser as he watched the sunlight glinting off the man’s bald head, distracted by thinking about was how fucking bad it must have hurt to get sunburned there “Go ahead buddy. Everyone else already has.”  
  
With that, Daniel screeched out of the driveway, engine coughing and sputtering as the junk in the vehicle’s bed slid around freely with a bright a tinkle of breaking glass. As far as meaningful exits went, it was pretty low on Sulu’s scale of clever departing words. But somehow that didn’t help the way that the words settled in his gut like a stone.   
  
The yard was quiet for a moment and Hikaru savored the silence, looking out at the fields, the bright blue sky, the low black smear of the mountains in the distance. Hikaru let his muscles relax for the first time since his shift had officially ended, rolling his shoulders and feeling the ever-present knots protest. It was quiet enough that he heard the distant creak of a loose floorboard, moments before the rasping of the screen door as it swung open. Hikaru looked away from the sky, past where the unsightly vehicle had been only moments before, to where Pavel had appeared in the doorway.  
  
Pavel watched him approach with shuttered eyes as Hikaru made his way across the crushed gravel driveway and the sickly brown grass of the yard, onto the creaking porch. The house was far enough away from the town that nobody was going to get on his case about upkeep, but Hikaru was still a little shocked at how badly Pavel had let the place decay. It might have been a bright, happy house once upon a time, but all Hikaru could see was the peeling paint flaking off the metal siding, the busted window that nobody had bothered to seal off.   
  
It didn’t take a genius to guess that the inside of the place was just as bad, if not worse, than the outside. Hikaru had surreptitiously checked Pavel’s file before he left the station, feeling guilty as he plugged the name into the database, and had been left shocked by Pavel’s record. He took solace in the knowledge that he wouldn’t have to deal with dirty, squalling infants or malnourished animals – Hikaru had to believe that, even at his worst, Pavel was better than that.  
  
“He do that?” Hikaru asked, tilting his head towards the busted window, completely unsurprised when Pavel nodded. “You want me to write him up on destruction of property?”   
  
“Nyet. It is not worth the effort. I am simply glad that he has gone without too much trouble.” Pavel reached out to Hikaru, gently touching his wrist. “Welcome back, Hikaru.”  
  
As far as reunions went, it was quite possibly the most depressing that Sulu had ever experienced. And that was saying a lot, given the number of ‘old friends’ that he had run into in the six months since his return to Iankt. Still, some part of him had hoped that Pavel would have managed, if not to escape, then to at least overcome his environment. Hikaru was a cop, an expert at keeping his face blank and unreadable, but he smiled as he submitted to Pavel’s hesitant touch.   
  
_Sunglasses have been paying for themselves today_ , Hikaru thought as he realized how glad he was that he had forgotten to take them off in the shade of the porch, that his eyes remained hidden.  
  
Pavel was a wreck.  
  
Hikaru’s mind stuttered over the blunt honesty of the thought, but failed to come up with a better way to put it. At first glance he hadn’t noticed anything glaringly wrong with his old friend - Pavel wasn’t crying or bleeding or obviously tweaking, eyes blown wide, digging at his skin. That alone put him ahead of half the people Sulu dealt with. Still, it didn’t take much observation to notice that he was standing on his porch nothing more than a pair of boxer-briefs and a dingy unbuttoned shirt. Then Hikaru took in Pavel’s pale, pale skin (and really, how did he stay so pale on such a sunny planet?), the dark circles under his eyes and the bruises that formed crude bracelets around his thin wrists. Pavel had lost weight where he hadn’t had much to begin with, turning his body into jumble of lines and sharp planes.   
  
The only thing that made him feel slightly better about the whole situation was the look in Pavel’s eyes, sad but still proud as he smiled at Hikaru, half hidden in the shadow of the doorway.  
  
It took all of three seconds for Hikaru’s noble intentions to abandon him. Pavel slid forward into his personal space, the light touch at his wrist shifting as their fingers tangled and then Pavel was pressed against him, tilting his head up to catch Hikaru’s mouth with his own. Four years had passed but somehow he still tasted the same, sweet and clean like fresh water, with a bitter tang that Hikaru didn’t remember, the delicate hitch of his breath as they kissed. Too soon, Pavel drew back, his face quirked into a lopsided smile as he reached up to gently remove Hikaru’s sunglasses, folding them with nimble fingers. Hikaru took the glasses from him, tucked them into his pocket and followed Pavel inside.  
  
After a while, Hikaru lay on his back, staring up at a crack in the ceiling and doing his best to ignore the way his arm was falling asleep, circulation all but cut-off from the pressure of Pavel’s head resting on his bicep. It was too warm in the stuffy house, even with the only sheet on the bed tangled around their legs. One of Pavel’s arms was thrown across Hikaru’s chest and his back itched from the combination of sweat and the unpleasant synthetic fabric of the mattress, but Hikaru did his best to stay still despite the heat and discomfort. Not that Pavel was asleep, but Hikaru knew that the moment would end soon enough without his help.  
  
“Thank you for coming by, Hikaru.” Pavel said, his voice soft in the silent house. It didn’t echo, even though it seemed like it should have “I was worried that he would become…violent when I told him to leave.”  
  
With his free hand Hikaru had started to trace light, barely there patterns along the blotches of discolored skin that marred Pavel’s arm. “Yeah, I can see why.”  
  
He regretted the words the moment that they left his mouth, but it was already too late to take them back. Pavel’s eyes went guarded and dark and he drew away from Hikaru, pushing himself up to sit on the edge of the mattress, scraping his fingers through his curly hair. Hikaru opened his mouth to apologize, but before he could find the words Pavel stood and began to pick through the clothes that littered the floor.  
  
Managing to stifle his sigh, Hikaru followed suit, collecting the pieces of his uniform from where they were scattered, pulling them on one at a time as he tried to avoid stepping on the debris that littered the bare floor - scraps of paper, an empty lighter, scorched squares of tinfoil.  
  
Hikaru had grown up in the same neighborhood Pavel Chekov, the weird, too-serious little kid that never tried to keep up with the older boys. Pavel had always been perfectly content to sit on the porch of his house and scroll through books on his countless PADD’s while Sulu chased balls and play-fought with the Denobulan kids down the street. He’d always sat by himself at lunch in school, scribbling formulas or reading, and he had looked so young and confused the first time that Hikaru had tried to strike up a conversation with him, responding in stuttering, heavily accented Standard.   
  
(Their dads had worked together, helping to build the spacedock. Sulu had only said hello to Pavel because his father had urged him to at dinner every night for a week.)   
  
After primary school Pavel had been in most of Hikaru’s classes, the teachers unwilling to accelerate such a small boy by more than four years despite his bright, beautiful mind. Hell, Pavel had tutored Hikaru more than a few of times in high school, some of the only times that Hikaru could count on being able to catch a glimpse of the real Pavel, his startlingly dry sense of humor and his tendency to lapse out of standard when he got excited, rambling on about star charts and math the way most of Hikaru’s other friends talked about girls or sports. Once he had loosened up, Pavel had tried to teach Hikaru some of the strange, sharp words from the Old Earth language his father spoke. Hikaru had shown him how to throw a punch.   
  
After that, their meetings had a whole lot less to do with homework.  
  
Then Hikaru had left, had gotten off this godforsaken planet with its burning black desert and wasteland of non-opportunities. Pavel hadn’t. Hikaru remembered talking with him about applying for Starfleet during those long summer nights before he had left for the academy, but something had held Pavel back. He had thought about it a lot at first, after Pavel had stopped writing him, but now that Hikaru had returned he wasn’t sure that he wanted to know.  
  
“I have to go to work.” It was the first thing Pavel had said since Hikaru had so gracefully put his foot in his mouth, but he didn’t sound angry. Instead he just sounded worn down and sad as he buttoned his shirt in front of the mirror, face unreadable in the reflection. Hikaru walked up behind him and set a gentle hand on his shoulder, stomach twisting as he felt rather than saw the way that Pavel softened under the touch.  
  
“Yeah, okay.” Hikaru said as he checked their reflections in the mirror, sex-messy hair and rumpled clothes. It was a lot like it had been during their senior year, except how it wasn’t at all. “You want me to stop by tomorrow?”  
  
Pavel nodded. Hikaru gave his shoulder one last squeeze, managed a smile – crooked but genuine – before he left.  
  
\---  
  
The Enterprise Hotel and Casino dominated the landscape, a behemoth of steel and shining silver glass that twisted forty stories into the flat blue sky. Not to say that it took a lot to tower above the city that surrounded it – except for the dense downtown, Iankt was an ugly sprawl of flat utilitarian buildings that got progressively more dilapidated as one moved away from the city center. Then again, it didn’t need to be pretty. Most of the visitors to the Enterprise beamed directly into the hotel, lost their money, and were transported away without ever setting foot outside.   
  
It was only early afternoon, but the streets were hot and quiet in the intense summer heat, traffic moving sluggishly beneath drooping imported palm trees. The temperature seemed perfectly content to hover just above ninety degrees, and the breeze that usually cooled the city - blown in from the ocean to the west - seemed to be taking the day off. Having two suns could be great for attracting tourists, but most of the time it was just a huge pain in the ass for the more permanent residents.  
  
A red light turned green, and a black limousine with heavily tinted windows pulled away from the slow race between stoplights. The vehicle hovered silently down the side street before turning again and disappearing into a subterranean parking garage, sliding gracefully beneath the earth like a sinking ship. The temperature change was immediate even within the limousine’s air conditioned interior, and Pike sighed in relief.  
  
Pike had heard, many times before, that such heat made men mad, shortening tempers as the beating sun drove the tormented that much closer to their personal boiling points. He’d seen it, too.   
  
The limo slowed and stopped in front of a bank of turbolifts, and no sooner had Pike tucked his sunglasses into the pocket of his suit than his chauffer swung the door swung open. The smell of hot asphalt and spilt motor oil drifted from the parking garage and into the limo, a slimy sensation that crawled down the back of Pike’s nose and into his throat. He nodded to McKenna as he climbed out of the vehicle and made his way to the turbolifts, removing his access card from his pocket and waving it in front of the receptor. Seconds later, the door opened in front of him with a pleasant chime and a soft rush of cool air.  
  
In the time since the first settlers had arrived, Iankt Prime had gone from being a lonely outpost on the edge of the trade circuits to a stopover point for almost a dozen major routes, as well as a common stopping point for exploratory vessels as Federation space expanded further and further. Iankt Prime couldn’t hold a candle to vacation planets like Risa, expansive black deserts not nearly as alluring as tropical jungle, but it mattered little to most of their visitors. The planet’s newfound popularity was a matter of convenience more than anything else. Not that Pike was complaining – he had paid dearly for that convenience.  
  
It was no different than it had been a thousand times before, the turbolift doors sliding open to reveal what had become Pike’s empire. It may have been a Thursday by the Iankt calendar, but the Enterprise knew no mid-week slump – the pilots and traders that made up the majority of their clientele went by a different schedule than the planet, beaming down from spacedock to squander their earnings while their ships were under inspection. Between the constant stream of ships on layover and the two conventions the Enterprise was hosting, the gaming floor was close to packed.  
  
Walking onto the main floor of the Enterprise was like walking into a stormy sea, being pummeled not with water but with waves of light and sound. Pike had thought, once, that it was a good drowning. The overwhelming sensation of success after so many years of struggle. Now he knew better. There was no good way to drown.  
  
Pike’s dark suit set him apart as he walked past the slot machines and the chula boards, the dabo wheels and the blackjack tables. He moved smoothly past scantily clad waitresses carrying trays of drinks, stopping to let a haggard looking Trill in a flannel shirt pass by. Most of the traders who ended up gambling at the Enterprise would have been just as happy to loose their credits in some dimly lit bar on the spacedock, punching their credit chips listlessly into the receivers, hoping to win it big. But Pike had built something beautiful, a place tasteful decor and bright light and free transport from the spacedock and complimentary drinks served by skimpily dressed waitresses. As long as you gambled.   
  
The Enterprise was Pike’s symphony of black marble and burnished steel, his impending doom of red carpets and mirrored countertops.  
  
As always, Pike met Nyota Uhura on the balcony that overlooked the main gaming floor. He could never quite figure out how she so effortlessly walked the knife’s edge between beauty and pure intimidation, the clean lines of her suit expertly emphasizing the strength beneath. Not many men in Pike’s position would have had a woman as their right hand. Pike knew just how foolish those men were – Uhura was an irreplaceable asset, ruthless and whip smart and willing to get the job done no matter what.   
  
Sometimes, though, Pike wished that Uhura would be a little less willing to tell him what he didn’t want to hear. Uhura turned to him, holding her PADD in front of her not so much like a shield as like a sword. Pike felt his blood run cold. She had opened her mouth to speak but Pike, trying to delay the inevitable for as long as possible, cut her off.  
  
“Any issues with the geophysics conference?” He asked, walking over to the railing and looking down at the craps tables, out at the slot machines, anywhere but at Uhura’s silently furious expression. At least it was a valid question – the last time they had hosted the Intergalactic Geophysics Society’s yearly meeting had been a disaster of drunkenness that had necessitated a complete decontamination of Conference Room B. Pike had only allowed them back on a strict drink ticket system, but he still had his concerns.  
  
“There have been no serious incidents, sir.” Uhura said, and while her voice was all business she didn’t bother to look at her PADD. Both of them already knew what she had to say “However, I would like to-“  
  
“What about the transporter?” Pike cut her off again, fiddling with his tie “I heard that it went offline this morning.”  
  
Uhura refused to let her boss stall any longer, her gaze cold steel as she pinned him.   
  
“Nero asked to speak with you.” She said, getting straight to the point “He’s waiting in his suite.” Tucking her PADD under her arm she strode forward, batting his hands away from his tie and re-aligning it herself.  
  
“Oh, and the transporter was offline for all of five seconds. Spacedock’s problem, not ours.” She smiled distractedly, tightening the knot around Pike’s neck “It was resolved before you even woke up -the crew of the _Christa McAuliffe_ have all arrived safely.”  
  
Pike looked past her, meeting his own gaze in the reflection of the glass. He didn’t look nearly as concerned as he felt, and it made him feel slightly better as he straightened his spine and tried to prepare himself for whatever was waiting for him in Nero’s suite. He hadn’t gotten where he was by being weak or easily intimidated, and he wasn’t going to let the Romulan son of a bitch push him around in his own casino, on his own planet.  
  
“Just once, Uhura, I’d like you to meet me in the morning with nothing but good news.”  
  
“Sorry, boss. Today’s just not that day.”  
  
\---  
  
Fifty miles away, Jim Kirk learned that the day could, in fact, get worse.  
  
His bike, which had been struggling along valiantly, finally ended its life in a cacophony of squeals and grinding gears. It was almost anticlimactic – Jim had been secretly hoping that when it died it would go in gouts of flame and hemorrhaged mechanics in the middle of rush hour. Instead, there was just a lot of noise and a sudden deceleration to nothingness on a mostly empty street right on the edge of town, as if the bike had seen the decrepit buildings in front of it, the Enterprise rising in the distance, one time too many and died of fright.  
  
Jim grabbed the enveloped from the storage compartment, spitting curses as he let the bike fall to the pavement. The car that had been behind him passed without a backwards glance, and Jim had to stop himself from shaking his fist at the antennaed driver because really, he wasn’t a holovid star on the Dumb and the Desperate or whatever the hell it was that Bones liked to watch when he got drunk and morose. It was hot on the side of the road and, without the breeze from moving on the cycle, Jim was slowly starting to drip sweat, trying to stay calm.   
  
As far as he could tell, his options were slim. He couldn’t call Bones for a ride (the good doctor was at work, not to mention the fact that he would be righteously pissed if he found out what Jim was up to), Gaila was on spacedock for the week, and he didn’t even have enough credits for the shitty excuse for public transit the city had, much less a cab. Jim wouldn’t have been adverse to the tried and true shoe leather express, if not for the very real threat of heatstroke coupled with the fact that the mystery address was still on the other side of town.   
  
He was still sitting there, trying to come up with some way of getting to the address on the envelope, when the solution came to him. Literally. It wasn’t the best thing that could have happened (a top-down convertible full of topless chicks with and a case of beer and a ticket off-planet), but Jim still thanked his lucky stars.   
  
“Hey, kid! Wanna trade bikes?”  
  
\---  
  
The two men standing guard outside of Nero’s hotel suite had the same type of heavy facial tattoos as their boss, harsh body modification that contrasted oddly with the neat suits that both men wore. They stood with their hands tense by their sides, both expressionless save for the faintest hint of a smirk. Pike resolved to have a talk with Nero about subtlety – anybody walking by would have seen the bumps the disruptors made under their jackets. The guard with the arrow-like tattoos – _Ayel,_ Pike thought distantly – stood to the side to let Pike pass as the hydraulic door slid open.   
  
By the time he and Uhura had reached the hallway that led to Nero’s suite, Pike had actually been feeling better than he had since he heard that his ruthless backer would be visiting. Uhura had updated him on the rest of the Enterprise’s daily business in the turbolift – it was mostly good news, thank God for small favors – and he had told her to go ahead and get started while he met with Nero. She had responded with a silent, serious look that let him know she didn’t agree with his decision, but hadn’t followed him out of the turbolift. He was suddenly, viscerally glad that he asked her to stay behind.  
  
It was so much worse than he had expected.  
  
The Enterprise didn’t cater to the rich and famous, those who expected the utmost luxury from their accommodations. The regular clientele were the types that usually rented rooms by the hour, and Pike turned a blind eye to the desk staff that allowed it as long as they stayed discreet. Still, he had made sure that the luxury suites were what the name implied and, sticking to the vague space theme of the Enterprise, had invested in holographic ceilings that could display various images from across the galaxy if the occupant so chose. Nero had the ceiling on, and although Pike was unfamiliar with the image he recognized it as some type of nebula, a beautiful cloud of blues and purples that contrasted sharply with the scene in Nero’s suite.   
  
Pike’s strength and confidence pooled around his feet as he stared at the horror show masquerading as a hotel room, leaving behind a sharp anger that sliced through his gut, a fear that clotted his blood in his veins.  
  
“Hello, Christopher!” Nero called from where he sat on one of the room’s synthfiber couches, plate in hand. In the dim room Pike could see some type of berry arranged on the plate, hoped that the fruit’s juices were what had caused the dark smear that marred Nero’s mouth and chin. As Pike stared, Nero swiped at his mouth with one of the white linen napkins, and the wet, glistening stain disappeared.   
  
Nero had programmed the couch to be as overstuffed as possible, and waved the napkin at Pike from where he sank into the cushions. “I do hope you’ll excuse the mess.”   
  
Pike wanted to throw up.   
  
“What the hell are you doing here?”  
  
“That’s an odd question, Christopher. I’m sure you can see that I’m enjoying a late brunch. My compliments to your chef, by the way.” Nero grinned at Pike with a mouthful of damaged teeth as he gestured vaguely at the replicator. He set his half-empty plate on the table in front of him, frosted glass spattered lightly with drying blood.  
  
“Don’t play games with me Nero. What do you want.” It wasn’t a question that time. Both of them knew that Nero didn’t visit unless he had a point to make.  
  
“I assure you, I don’t want anything. I just came to check up on you, make sure my investments are being protected.” Nero was still smiling faintly as he reclined into the yielding material of the couch, stretching his arms as if he had been working very hard and letting them rest on the top of the cushions. It was one of the more disturbing smiles that Pike had ever seen, and he found that he was thankful that it never reached the Romulan’s cold, black eyes.  
  
“You’re investments are fine. Have you seen the place? Business is booming.” Pike could feel the rage and shame creeping up his spine as he tried very hard not to look at the mess Nero had made.  
  
“Christopher, you and I both know that this isn’t your only business. Your people are sloppy, undisciplined. That kind of behavior leads to problems.” The consonants caught hard on Nero’s teeth as his tone dropped, went dark and threatening. “You may own him, Christopher, but you are not the Governor anymore.”   
  
“My people are fine.” Pike bristled at the accusation, clenching his fists by his sides.  
  
“Oh, I sincerely doubt that.” Nero gave a short, harsh laugh as he regarded Pike from across the room. In the bathroom, something dripped into a puddle with a hollow, liquid plop.  
  
Pike knew that he was pushing his luck, but he couldn’t help himself, suddenly overwhelmed by disgust. “What do you know about fine? This is disgusting, there’s no honor in it!”  
  
“Don’t talk to me about honor! You know nothing of honor, Christopher!” Nero was off of the couch and halfway across the room before Pike could even blink “I know about every man you’ve ever killed, every family you’ve ever screwed over to get where you are.” Nero spat, his face a mask of rage “ _You_ came crawling to _me_ in your darkest hour, don’t you talk to me about honor.”  
  
Pike felt himself go very still as Nero stalked closer, stuck in the ancient moment between fight and flight that humans had known for centuries. He knew that he needed Nero’s good graces, needed his connections and influence, but suddenly the future of Pike’s career mattered a lot less than the knowledge that Nero had the strength to tear him apart. He took a shallow breath, muscles tight, smelling metal and blood and something darker, a hundred times more revolting.   
  
Before he could decide how to react Nero was moving past him and towards the door.  
  
“You’ll be hearing from me Pike. Send someone to clean up this mess.” Then Nero was gone, out into the hallway and to do God only knew what. Somewhere in his brain, in a small, hysterical part of his mind that hid under the throb of _hatehatehate_ and the urge to be sick, Pike wondered how Nero had been able to command the hydraulic door to slam.  
  
Pike took a deep breath, sparing one last look at the room’s massive bed. The once white linens were stained with gouts of blood, the sheets a tangled mess that told of struggle and sick ecstasy. Nero hadn’t been neat – the blood had spattered onto the walls and the lighting fixtures, the carpet and the replicator, halfway across the room. (It was amazing what liquids could do, under pressure.) A bloody handprint was smeared across the doorway of the bathroom, and although Pike couldn’t see into the shadows he could hear the steady dripping the echoed from within.  
  
Two figures were tangled on the bed – humans, young, a male and a female - and Pike could see where their hands and feet had been bound with plastic ties, their mouths taped shut. A shattered lamp and an overturned chair told of struggle, but Pike suspected that whatever fight they had managed to put up would have only amused Nero. It made him sick to look at, but Pike forced himself to absorb the details.  
  
The last thing Pike saw before he exited the room was the reflection in their still-wide eyes as they looked, unseeing, at the ceiling, the pulsing miasma of the nebulas that swirled above them, beautiful and eternal and dark.  
  
Uhura was waiting for him in the hallway.   
  
Her face was carefully blank, but when Pike managed to look in her eyes he saw everything that he needed to know. What he found there surprised him – where Pike had been expecting to find fear, maybe even pity, he found nothing but anger and ice cold resolve. It took him a minute to figure out that neither of those things was aimed specifically at him.  
  
“Boss.”  
  
“Call the cleaners, Uhura.” He hadn’t planned on telling her the details, but the look in her eyes told him that she already knew everything. She just nodded, holding his gaze.  
  
“Do you want me to make them disappear?”   
  
Pike faltered, nodded. It bothered him to hear Uhura talking so plainly about what had happened, but he was clearly deluding himself, projecting innocence where it didn’t belong. Uhura had helped him with his dirty work before, probably knew more about what Pike was into than he did. When everything ran smoothly it was too easy for him to look at her and see only his beautiful, capable assistant. Too easy to forget about her background, why he had chosen her to be his right hand.  
  
\---  
  
Jim crested the low hill, panting and cursing. He could hear the ocean, so close, the waves crashing on the shore. The first thing he was going to do after he delivered the package, Jim told himself, was to throw himself fully clothed into the sea.   
  
The package in question sat calm and conspicuous in the basket of the bicycle, mocking him, and Jim glared down at it for what was probably the seven-hundredth time. Two o’clock had passed an hour ago, but Jim didn’t have enough energy left to worry about whatever consequences he might end up facing for a late drop-off. His shirt was completely soaked through with sweat, clinging to his back and his sides, and Jim was beginning to wish that he had just let Keenser stun him and drag him to jail, send him back to the penal colony, anything to keep him from having to pedal any farther.  
  
That wasn’t really true. Jim valued his life way too much to throw it away over a little bit of physical exercise. At least that was what he kept telling himself.  
  
Ever since his cycle had finally given up the ghost, Jim’s luck had been improving. Sure, it may have been improving by nearly microscopic increments, but it was still improving nonetheless. He’d been lucky, damn lucky, that the kid had traded bikes with him; even if it meant downgrading from his old spokeless motorcycle to the rusty green five-speed the kid had been riding. Then Jim had been lucky enough to catch a ride for a couple of miles, tossing his bike in the back of a truck while the old lady who owned it drove him as far as the sex shop where she worked.   
  
Even with all the shortcuts he had taken, the last ten miles had been a sweltering hell.   
  
After Jim caught his breath he kicked the bike forward, resting his weight on the pedals as he cruised slowly down the hill and towards the ocean. There was a playing card clipped to the bike, an old school decoration that Jim had first admired and then grown to hate as it clacked against the spokes of the bike in a constant, rapid fire of clicks. The design on the back of the card showed that it had once belonged to The Enterprise, and Jim had promised himself – somewhere around mile twelve – that his first order of business after throwing himself into the ocean would be to tear the card to shreds. It was a great motivator.  
  
Pumping the hand brake lightly, Jim followed the road as it curved past a stand of sea grapes and cut between the mostly deserted parking lot and the ocean. It was quiet save for the crashing of the waves and the faint breeze that blew off of the water, rustling the sad looking vegetation. Jim took a deep breath, savoring the flavor of the salt in the air. A smattering of tourists were scattered randomly across the beach, lying listlessly on bright colored towels and cooking in the heat. Jim tracked them with his eyes as he coasted past, watching as a pale Andorian woman sat up and rubbed sunscreen on her antennae.   
  
Then he was past the parking lot and the road cut inland again, curving past a group of small souvenir shops and a faded stand that sold ice cream, frozen insects, and various beach treats meant to appeal to a number of different species. None of the buildings were in the best of shape, and the flabby humanoid behind the counter of the ice cream stand glared at Jim with one large, watery eye as he rode by. Charming. Keeping one eye on the road empty road in front of him, Jim glanced down to check the address on the package. It hadn’t changed since the last time he’d looked at it, minutes before, and Jim looked up just in time to take the sharp right into the parking lot of his destination.   
  
Jim bore down hard on the brakes and the bike came to a screeching halt, the obnoxious clicking of the playing card finally silenced. Jim nudged the kickstand with the toe of his boot and dismounted the bike, staring apprehensively at the building in front of him. It was probably the nicest building in the small shopping area, but it set Jim’s hair on end – the large neon sign above the door was on despite the fact that it was the middle of the day, and as hard as he tried Jim couldn’t see anything through the tinted plate glass windows. Worst of all, he had no idea what the place was supposed to be – the glowing red sign said “SCOTTY’S”, but didn’t lend and clues as to what awaited Jim behind the wide swinging doors.  
  
Oh well. There was no delaying the inevitable.   
  
His questions were answered as soon as he trudged across the parking lot and pushed open the door. The air conditioning was a sudden, welcome relief, and Jim relaxed despite himself the moment he set foot inside the small restaurant. Aside from one or two booths where people sat and poked at baskets of French fries, the building looked deserted. Suddenly self conscious of his mission, Jim held the bulging envelope behind his back, standing on his toes and glancing around for a server or a short-order cook, anybody that he could hand the envelope to and escape.  
  
As if on cue, a lanky kid with curly hair walked out of the back. He had an apron tied around his waist, juggling a pitcher of water and an armful of plates, but he still brightened when he saw Jim standing awkwardly near the door. It was hard not to feel a little bad for him – the kid probably didn’t make shit for tips if this was as busy as the place ever got. While Jim waited, the kid dropped off the pitcher of water and the plates at one of the few occupied tables before making his way over.  
  
“Table for one?” The kid started digging around for a menu, but Jim cut him off  
  
“Er, no, uh…” Jim glanced at his nametag “Pavel. I have something to drop off.”  
  
“Oh.” Pavel deflated a bit at that, no doubt lamenting the loss of a possible customer, and for the first time Jim noticed the dark circles under his eyes, the closed-off way the kid held himself. To give Pavel credit, he didn’t bother asking what Jim had to deliver, just lead him past the empty booths to an office at the back of the restaurant.  
  
Jim wracked his brain in a futile attempt to remember where he had seen the kid before. The permanent population of Iankt used to be small enough that Jim knew, either personally or in passing, most of the people in his peer group. Even after the number of citizens had swelled with the building of the casino, Jim was constantly running into people he had gone to school with. Small galaxy and all that. Hell, Jim had just bumped into Hikaru Sulu the other day after he had gotten out of a meeting with his parole officer. But even though Pavel looked faintly familiar, Jim quickly gave up on trying remembering where he knew him from – he definitely would have remembered the kid’s accent.  
  
Pavel left Jim standing dumbly outside a closed door, disappearing back into the kitchen. The pleasant relief of the air conditioning had become a discomfort, and the damp fabric of his shirt clung to his torso. Eager to be done with his errand, Jim didn’t bother to knock before he pushed the door open and stepped inside the tiny office. It seemed to be at least partially a stockroom, with boxes dried food stacked shoulder high and cartons full of various unidentifiable machine parts strewn about. The faux-wood desk looked like it had been added as an afterthought, and there was just enough room for Jim to stand in front of it.  
  
“Who’re you, then?” The man behind the desk was wearing a paper cook’s hat perched on top of his short hair and was sorting through receipts, typing numbers rapidly onto a PADD. He hadn’t even looked up as Jim entered, too preoccupied by the task at hand.  
  
Apparently everybody in the restaurant had some type of strange accent, but at least Jim had figured out why they called the place _Scotty’s_.’ That, and the flickering nameplate holo on the desk that read ‘Montgomery Scott.’  
  
“I’m supposed to drop this off.” Jim held out the lumpy package and Scott looked up from his messy desk. That, at least, had gotten the man’s attention.   
  
“Och, yer an hour late laddie.” The man stood up, pushing his chair back across the linoleum with a harsh squeal, and walked around the desk. Jim briefly worried that Scott was going to bury them both under an avalanche of pasta boxes, but the man was obviously used to navigating the cramped quarters. “Speaking of” he took the envelope from Jim and looked it over, obviously checking for tampers “how’d you come to get this?”  
  
“Some cop gave it to me. Told me to bring it here.” Jim hesitated for a moment under the older man’s scrutiny “I didn’t open it or anything…”  
  
“Wee lazy bastard!” Scott cut him off, tossing the bulging envelope carelessly back on the already debris-laden desk, before enthusiastically shaking Jim’s hand “I’m guessing you can’t be blamed, then. Name’s Montgomery Scott.”  
  
“Uh, Jim Kirk.” Jim hadn’t planned on learning anybody’s name. He just wanted the package out of his hands, wanted to go home and sleep the rest of the day. Jim released Scott’s calloused hand and took a hesitant step backwards. “Listen, I should be going.”  
  
“Nonsense! You want a sandwich? Best on the beach!”  
  
“Not really. My car broke down and, uh, I gotta get back home and feed my dog.” Jim felt better that it was only half a lie, but Scott was obviously concerned.   
  
“I’ll call you a cab, then.” Before Jim could argue, Scott was steering him out of the cramped office and back into the restaurant proper, directing Jim towards an isolated booth before disappearing. Jim seriously just considered leaving, walking away from the whole mess, but he was just so exhausted from the ride over that he didn’t think he could have made it more than a couple of blocks without collapsing.  
  
Scott (“Call me Scotty, boyo”) came back with two sandwiches, insisting that Jim eat one even after he revealed that he didn’t have any money. Jim had to admit that the sandwiches were pretty damn delicious, hot and greasy and obviously not replicated. The restaurant may have been a front, but Scotty took his food seriously.   
  
Jim had expected the conversation to be stilted and awkward, but he found that he actually liked Scotty – he was genuinely funny and easy to talk too, even if it was hard to parse his accent at times. Pavel hovered on the sidelines, refilling their drinks as they chatted around mouthfuls of chips and waited for Jim’s cab to arrive, shooting the shit and bonding over a shared love of mechanics. The sandwiches disappeared quickly, and before Jim knew it his cab was idling impatiently in the parking lot.  
  
They said their goodbyes, but when Jim went to shake Scotty’s hand, he felt something other than flesh press into his palm. Going still, Jim looked down at the folded paper credits that Scotty had passed him, then back up at the man in question. His thoughts must have been clear on his face, because Scotty said   
  
“Relax, laddie, I’m not the cops.” Jim looked at Scott then, really looked at him. The man’s initial outburst of manic energy had long since subsided, but the odd light in his eyes had remained. It was a look that somehow managed to be both calculating and friendly and Jim couldn’t tell what Scotty was thinking at all as he continued   
  
“You ever want to make some real money, you come back and see me.”


	2. Interlude - Chekov

The house was dark when Pavel got home from work, empty and quiet except for the soft sounds that his steps made on the floor. He kicked off his shoes by the door, stretching his sore muscles and making a beeline for the bedroom. Ever since the day that Pavel had arrived home from the recruiter’s office, only to find his father lying on top of the bedcovers wearing his best suit, Pavel hated going into silent houses. Years had passed, but Pavel still did his best to fill those silences, to avoid thoughts of his gentle, brilliant father (who would have been so disappointed in Pavel) and the solemn handwritten note that the man had left, sealed, on the kitchen counter.  
  
It should have been a relief, to be able to open the door without having to worry about dodging impromptu missiles and hurled insults, to feel safe in his own home again. He did. It was. But just as Daniel’s departure had lifted a burden from Pavel’s shoulders, Hikaru’s appearance had sliced through him like a plasma torch.   
  
Pavel could smell him - _them_ \- on his mattress when he sat down next to it, cross-legged on the floor. The sheet was still tangled near the foot of the bed, and it made Pavel smile, made something long-forgotten twist and squirm in his belly as he remembered the feel of Hikaru’s body above his. How Hikaru had touched him and whispered his name, like Pavel was something special. Something to be cherished.   
  
It was cold in the house, the frigid nighttime air creeping through the cracks in the walls and the broken window, but Pavel barely noticed the dropping temperature as he lifted the mattress and reached beneath it. He withdrew a moment later, hand clutched around a lighter and a small plastic bag, and let the mattress fall back to the floor with a padded _whumfp_ as he reached for the nearest square of tinfoil.  
  
He got high automatically, out of habit, his mind miles and years away as he opened the baggie with his teeth and shook a clump of the dusty brown powder onto the foil. If anybody were to have observed him then, it would have become obvious how rote the motions were, long since memorized, practiced and perfected. Pavel dug a straw out of his pocket and stuck it in his mouth, one of his practiced hands held the tinfoil steady while the other flicked the wheel on the lighter. Hunching forward to protect the small, flickering flame, Pavel held the straw steady between his lips and inhaled.  
  
The smoke crawled down his throat and curled in his chest, a living, fiery thing with claws of diamond. It burnt in his lungs, familiar, and old friend, and Pavel tilted his head back to blow smoke that the ceiling. As he exhaled, Pavel let the creeping calmness overwhelm him, smother him and drag him into the warm, deep water that engulfed him. He was falling. He was floating. He was everything and nothing.   
  
The black hole hidden in the heart of a dying star.


	3. Part Two

Sulu checked himself in the mirror of the station locker room, shifting out of the way as a large Caitian officer passed behind him. He looked like hell, blurry eyed and sore from laying on the shitty excuse for a mattress that was Pavel’s bed, and his hair stuck up at odd, unprofessional angles.  
  
Staying over at Pavel’s had been a bad idea in more ways than one, but the afterglow had been too good to disrupt as they curled around each other like quotation marks, sharing body heat in the drafty house. It had been nice to hold him like that again, and Hikaru had resolved that he was going to bring Pavel some sheets – sleeping on a bare mattress on the floor was ridiculous (not that Hikaru’s place was much nicer, but that was beside the point). Maybe some food too, because for a guy who worked in a restaurant Pavel’s kitchen was worryingly empty. The idea had seemed great at the time, his mind clouded with sleep, Pavel’s skin warm and soft under his hands.  
  
Hikaru had woken up alone in the early hours of the morning, face glued to the mattress by his own drool, acutely aware of the smell of burning polystyrene that drifted in from the adjacent room.   
  
He hadn’t been able to fall back asleep after that, feigning unconsciousness when the mattress dipped and Pavel burrowed back against him eons later, staring unseeing up at the ceiling as he tried to calm his stormy, jumbled thoughts. When the suns had finally risen, Sulu had pulled his uniform on and resigned himself to what was obviously going to be a terrible day – he hadn’t missed for a second how Pavel shied away from his gaze as he’d dressed, refused to meet his eyes. Sulu was nowhere near as subtle as he liked to think he was sometimes.  
  
In fact, Sulu had been so prepared for his day to go to shit that he almost couldn’t believe it when he found himself halfway through his shift with no particularly disastrous incidents. So far he hadn’t had to deal with anything worse than a preteen shoplifter and a drunk and disorderly that had wandered out into traffic and sat down in the middle of the road to yell at cars. As far as days went, it was shaping up to be surprisingly decent, if not one of Sulu’s best.  
  
Then he was called to the Enterprise.  
  
It hadn’t really registered at first, despite his perpetual anticipation of that very moment. Sulu had stuffed his half-eaten burger in one of the cruiser’s empty drink holders and licked the sauce off his fingers before he flipped on the sirens and pulled into traffic. He got all of three blocks before he realized that dispatch hadn’t told him that he was responding to a code, coloring with embarrassment but keeping his sirens on - even if it wasn’t an actual police emergency, Sulu didn’t think it would be wise to keep Pike waiting for an hour while he fought through the sluggish traffic.   
  
Sulu had always thought that it was odd for a casino that catered almost entirely to those who worked and lived in the black to have been themed after space. After all, he wouldn’t have wanted to go to a crime-themed hotel (Sulu doubted that _anyone_ would have wanted to stay at a place with a theme of desperation and drug violence but, again, that was entirely beside the point). Nobody knew why Pike had designed his casino with the universe in mind, but it was undeniably beautiful. He had kept it vague and tasteful, mostly hidden in the little details, the types of things that were easy to miss when glued to the technicolor gambling machines – the patterns of the reflective chips in the marble floors meant to mimic famous star charts, the columnar lighting fixtures vaguely reminiscent of warp cores.   
  
Of course, all of these minor details were observed on the fly - Sulu hadn’t so much as stepped through the door before he was accosted by Pike’s personal assistant.   
  
“Are you Officer Hikaru Sulu?” She said, looking at him critically. When she spoke it sounded a whole lot more like a statement than a question, and Sulu felt suddenly unsure of the answer.  
  
“Yes?”  
  
“Nyota Uhura.” She shook his hand quickly and firmly “Please follow me.”  
  
Uhura led him across the expansive gaming floor to a secluded turbolift, her long strides making brisk work of the distance despite the stiletto heels she wore. Sulu, who ran down criminals for a living, almost had to jog to keep up.   
  
He didn’t want to stare, to be rude, but he couldn’t help trying to observe Uhura out of the corner of his eye as she scanned her palm-sized identification card to call the turbolift. Everything about her was professional and confident, beautiful and severe. She barely spared him a sideways glance as they rode silently towards the top of the building. Hell, with her slicked back ponytail and perfect posture, she could have easily passed for a cop. She probably would have done a better job than Sulu ever could have.  
  
The turbolift had obviously been modified to travel at slower than normal speeds - for effect or security, Sulu didn’t know – but despite trying to prepare himself, Sulu still felt his stomach flip when the door slid open with a soft huff of air to reveal Pike’s office. Sulu had been expecting a hallway or maybe a waiting room, some type of bland reception area with a girl behind a desk juggling comm calls while a blank-faced security drone guarded the door to Pike’s inner chamber. The complete absence of any secondary physical security was obvious and conspicuous, and Pike’s message couldn’t have been any more clear.  
  
Uhura stepped into the room and gestured for Sulu to move forward, making a curt motion towards Pike’s desk. There was a sleek, high-backed chair behind the wide desk, facing away from the room and towards of the wall of windows that looked out over the sprawl of the city and the low black mountains to the east. Sulu couldn’t quite figure out what to do with his hands as he made his way across the large, sparsely furnished room. It was like a minefield of clean lines and dark colors and Sulu could hear his blood pounding in his ears.   
  
Somewhere out of his view a fountain bubbled, making small, calming sounds that were so different than the crashing noise of the sea.  
  
\---  
  
Jim had waited a week before he accepted Scotty’s offer.   
  
Knowing that the option was there made it harder and harder for Jim to keep his mouth shut when his boss snapped at him and told him to go clean up the vomit by the Slingo machines. It made it a lot more difficult to look around the crappy trailer he shared with Bones, to bite his tongue when Bones had to take on extra shifts at the clinic to keep their power from being shut off. Jim hadn’t been able to pull his weight since he had gotten back from the penal colony, and even though Bones said that he didn’t mind, Jim couldn’t miss the bags under his eyes or the landslide slope of his shoulders when he got home at night.  
  
Still, the only thing that had caused Jim to hesitate, had caused him to reconsider taking the job with Scotty, had been Leonard McCoy himself. Grumpy Doctor McCoy, who woke up petulant, ate a contrary lunch, and went to sleep not backing down for shit. Who always looked Jim in the eye when they fucked and would sometimes watch him across the table when he thought Jim wasn’t looking, eyes soft with affection but never with pity.  
  
Bones had waited nine months while Jim broke rocks and fought for his life on Tantalus, but the first thing he had done upon Jim’s return had been to swear that Jim would be out on his ass if got involved in that “no good drug bullshit” again. Well, maybe that had technically been the second thing he had done. But as much as Jim preferred to remember the first part of their reunion, he knew that Bones had been serious.  
  
That was why Jim hadn’t mention the errand he had been forced to run, didn’t say anything about Scotty’s offer. Bones would only get angry and fight him about it, and Jim was too worn out to argue about something that he wasn’t even completely certain about himself. Instead, he told Bones that he had been offered a promotion at the casino, one with longer, more erratic hours, but slightly higher pay. Jim thought that he might have blown it when he said that he’d been offered the promotion on account of how reliable he’d been, but it ended up being all he could to try and keep his heart from breaking at the proud, hopeful look that crossed Bones’ face.  
  
It had been difficult between them lately, but Bones was still the most important thing in Jim’s life. That was why the job with Scotty was only temporary, Jim had told himself when he had stood outside of the beachside restaurant. Just for the next couple of months. He would work for a while and save everything he made until he had enough money to buy them both tickets off Iankt Prime, to any place that Bones wanted to go, and they could start again somewhere new.  
  
Scotty had clapped him on the back, shoving another delicious sandwich in his hands and leaving Jim alone in the deserted dining area while he disappeared into the confines of his cramped office. The restaurant had been completely empty that morning, save for Scotty, Jim, and Pavel, who sat quietly near the door folding napkins. The kid didn’t strike Jim as the snitching type – he obviously knew what went on in the restaurant – but his poorly hidden, wide-eyed glances made Jim feel uncomfortable. Luckily, Scotty had reemerged a moment later to ask Jim how he felt about Vulcans.  
  
“He’s a bit of an odd bugger, but I think you two would get along aw’right.”  
  
The ‘odd bugger’ part was probably the understatement of the century, but Jim was beginning to doubt Scotty’s accuracy on the second part.   
  
Spock wore suits even though Scotty had told Jim that he could wear whatever he pleased, and had been tasked with the duty of driving Jim around for a couple of weeks and make sure he learned the ropes. It wasn’t that Jim had been completely unprepared. He’d read about Vulcans in school of course, first contact, all that Federation history crap, and he had seen a couple of more bizarre pornos. It was just that nothing could have fully prepared him for the reality of spending eight hours a day driving around with no one but a Vulcan for company.   
  
“Alright, so who which would you rather screw? A Klingon or an Edosian?”  
  
“To ‘screw’ has many connotations Mr. Kirk.” Jim fought back a sigh as he tapped his fingers on the armrest, staring out the window at the motionless traffic that surrounded them. “If you mean to inquire about my preference in regards to interspecies intercourse, your question is irrelevant - I am currently in a committed relationship and lack the proper physiology to copulate with either of the aforementioned species.”  
  
Spock and his goddamn logic. In the three days that they had been doing deliveries, Spock had shot down every single one of Jim’s attempts at conversation as either ‘illogical’ or ‘irrelevant.’ Worse yet, Spock had established his dominion over the radio early on, and had refused to play anything other than weird classical music. Spock told him that the soothing music was a logical choice for those engaging in high-stress occupations such as their own, but all Jim knew was that it made him want to fall asleep and drool all over himself. If he wouldn’t have known better, he would have thought that the Vulcan behind the wheel was being logical just to spite him.   
  
As it was, he wasn’t completely prepared to rule out that possibility.  
  
“C’mon, Spock, it’s a rhetorical question.” A single beat skipped while Jim processed what Spock had said, and then “Wait. Hold the fucking phone. You’re dating somebody?”  
  
Jim’s immune system was poor at the best of times, and Bones had obviously forgotten to vaccinate him against foot-in-mouth disease. He could already see Spock’s eyebrow creeping up towards his weird, bowl cut hairline, and Jim could already hear him asking what phones had to do with Jim’s obviously low opinion of his heretofore unmentioned personal life.  
  
“Not to, uh, no offence?” Jim fumbled for words as he tried to salvage the situation “I didn’t mean to sound surprised, I just didn’t know there was a big Vulcan community on this rock.”  
  
“There is not. She is human.” Spock’s emotionless exterior was flawless, even though Jim was seconds away from either dying of embarrassment or climbing out of the car and throttling whoever had caused the gridlock. Never again would he let Spock justify going through the center of town to get somewhere. They could have driven a loop around the entire city in the time they had been stuck in traffic.  
  
“Whoa, really? I thought Vulcans were kind of…” _xenocentric_ “…opposed to interspecies romance.” Jim said, looking back at the traffic as the light changed and Spock managed to drive forward a whole foot and a half. A police cruiser blew by with its sirens blaring, half on the sidewalk, and Jim half heartedly flipped it the bird.  
  
“I am half human” Spock said, in a tone that was clearly meant to end the conversation. As if that answered everything instead of creating a thousand more questions.  
  
Jim was still curious but he let it drop, deciding to count himself lucky that Spock had given him any details at all. Pressing Spock for more information would only lead to the Vulcan ignoring him completely and turning on the radio, which was something that Jim really wanted to avoid.  
  
The car continued to move forward at a snail’s pace, and Jim had to suppress a cheer when Spock flipped on the blinker and pulled into the turn lane.   
  
It wasn’t that he had expected the job to be exciting. He hadn’t. Hell, with ninety-five percent of the police force paid off and the other five percent probably snorting speed in a futile effort to pick up the slack, it was almost ridiculously low risk. When the head of the racket was the most powerful person on planet, the danger and excitement tended to go out of breaking the law.   
  
Only people like Jim ever did anything resembling serious time, arrogant kids who had more brains than sense and tried to get out of paying their dues. At least that was what he had been told. Either way, Jim had learned his lesson.  
  
So yeah, Jim hadn’t exactly expected an exciting relapse into the world of crime, but even his realistic expectations were no match for what seemed like an eternity stuck in gridlock traffic.  
  
Spock whipped through the next yellow light and down a mostly deserted side street. Jim tightened his feet around the box that rode between them when Spock all but spun out as he pulled into a small fenced parking lot, almost jumping the curb. Spock didn’t so much as twitch and eyebrow at the shit-eating grin Jim shot him, face passive as always, but Jim was pleased nonetheless – Vulcans, he had quickly learned, were all about understatement and subtext.  
  
Spock parked the car while Jim dug through the box at his feet. It was mostly unmarked manila envelopes, stacked neatly and marked with cryptic codes, but it didn’t take a genius to figure out what was inside. The envelopes fought for space with the other assorted paraphernalia that Scotty had them delivering - unregistered phasers with the tracking chips removed (highly illegal), electronic components sealed in silver foil (highly mysterious), a vacuum sealed baggie that sloshed with mysterious white liquid (just plain weird).  
  
Jim could feel Spock looking at him as he searched through the stack of envelopes but chose to ignore it. The only time that he’d come close to eliciting anything resembling an emotional response from his partner had been on their first day of deliveries. Spock had started telling him which envelope to deliver, and maybe Jim had been hallucinating from frustration and boredom but he thought that he heard a slight touch of condescension in Spock’s voice.  
  
(“Here we will be delivering envelope 2-” “Yeah, 27B-6. Got it.”)  
  
After that first day, Spock had stopped telling Jim which envelopes to deliver when they stopped. Jim figured that it was some sort of weird, passive aggressive test, but so far Spock hadn’t changed the system and Jim hadn’t chosen incorrectly. He was willing to admit that he could have found a nicer way of telling Spock that his precious little cipher had been cracked by a dirtbag human, but the poorly hidden look of hurt surprise (and yeah, maybe a little respect) on the Vulcan’s face had been worth it.   
  
Really though, what else was he supposed to do riding shotgun all day next to a guy who refused to make conversation or play decent music? Jim had to entertain himself somehow.  
  
The envelope he needed was all the way at the bottom of the stack, and Jim had to shift the others before he could remove it. Package in hand, Jim checked to make sure that his phaser was tucked into the waistband of his jeans before he pushed open the door of the hovercar and stepped out into the baking desert heat. He stretched once, muscles cramped from sitting in traffic for so long, before he slammed the door of the car and walked towards the low cinderblock building that squatted in front of him.  
  
The building had looked a lot like an architectural version of the mashed potatoes that the Tantalus replicators had shit out, sitting lonely and gross on the edge of Jim’s plate. Business obviously was not doing well if the abandoned parking lot was anything to go by, and if Jim would have been thinking he would have registered the lack of business as odd – the parking lots of sex stores were never so empty. What few, small windows the building had were barred and there was an unmasked security camera above the door. Jim made a cheerful, if obscene, gesture as he passed underneath it and into the shop, delivery in hand. Five steps past the threshold he stopped dead in his tracks, suddenly aware that something was very, very wrong.  
  
\---  
  
“Officer Sulu?”  
  
Pike stood up without rotating the chair and turned, smiling at Sulu as he set a PADD on his desk before he walked around it to shake Sulu’s hand. He was wearing a rumpled grey suit with a loud gold tie and had a pair of small rimless reading glasses perched on his nose, an outfit that couldn’t have been more different than Sulu’s own pressed uniform. In that moment, when they first clasped hands, all that Sulu could see was a tired old man gone gray around the edges. Even Pike’s toothy grin couldn’t hide how worn down he looked, the shadows that lurked near the corners of his eyes. It was all wrong, nothing like he had expected, and Sulu had to remind himself not to underestimate Christopher Pike even as he shook the man’s hand and hesitantly returned the smile.   
  
“That’s me.” Sulu had meant to sound lighthearted, maybe a little confused as to why he was being called to talk to Pike, but when he spoke it came out in a shaky monotone that Sulu could barely recognize as belonging to him. Fuck. This was not something that Sulu could afford to fumble.  
  
Luckily, Pike either didn’t notice or didn’t care about Sulu’s tone as he released his hand and motioned him forward. Sulu was faintly glad that he hadn’t been asked to sit – the black duroplast chair in front of Pike’s desk looked ergonomically designed to be as uncomfortable as possible. A moment later they were standing side by side in front of the window. Sulu watched Pike’s reflection, but the other man seemed preoccupied by the vast panoramic view.  
  
“I was sorry to hear about your sister, Officer Sulu. She was a fine young lady.”   
  
And _that_ was why he had been warned against letting his guard down around Pike. Sulu felt his hands clench by his sides but kept his mouth shut. His little sister had been a fine young lady, right up until she had choked to death in a puddle of her own vomit.  
  
“You grew up on this colony. I knew your father, met him when he was working on building the spacedock. He was a good man, and everyone I’ve heard talk about you says you’re a lot like him.” Pike looked at Sulu critically over the edge of his reading glasses, finally acknowledging him in the reflection of the glass. “Determined. Reliable. You couldn’t hack it at Starfleet, but that’s alright.”  
  
Sulu opened his mouth to reply. He wasn’t sure if he meant to defend himself or to ask who had been telling Pike about him, but the older man cut him off with a disinterested wave of his hand.  
  
“And when I say that I want you to know that I’m not trying to coddle you. Starfleet didn’t work out for me either.” Pike’s lips quirked in a small, unreadable smile, before he continued  
  
“Come work for me. No more of this colony cop bullshit. You’re too decent for them anyway. There’s room for advancement here, and you won’t have to keep tackling drunks to pay the rent.”  
  
“Mister Pike, I-“  
  
“Don’t give me an answer now.” Pike turned away from the window and moved to sit in his chair, turning away from Sulu “I want you to think about it, get back to me in a week or two when you’ve had time to really consider your options.”   
  
Sulu nodded mutely, unsure of how to proceed, before he belatedly realized that Pike couldn’t see him. Before he could manage to formulate a verbal reply, Uhura spoke up from her post near the door.  
  
“I’ll see you out, Officer Sulu.” As if on cue the turbolift doors slid open with a chime and Uhura stepped inside, extending her arm to keep them from closing as she waited to escort Sulu away.  
  
Sulu swallowed loudly and moved to start his trek back across the room, but before he had taken more than a couple of steps Pike spoke again. The former governor didn’t look up from the PADD he was scrolling through, but Sulu couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being dissected by the man.  
  
“Remember what I said, Sulu. You have a lot of promise. It would be a shame to see you waste it.” Pike didn’t seem to want a response, dismissing him with a vague hand gesture, but Sulu didn’t think that remembering the encounter was going to be a problem.   
  
He stared unseeing at the inoffensive silver walls of the turbolift as it slowly descended back to earth, watching the bars of light that seemed to almost crawl by, and was it really necessary for them to make the damn thing go so slow? Suddenly, shrill beep rang out in the enclosed space and Sulu patted at the pockets of his uniform, confused, until he saw Uhura attaching a slim earpiece.  
  
“We must have the same phone.” Sulu managed a chagrined smile, wishing that the floor beneath him would collapse so that he could just fall to the bottom of the shaft and get it over with.  
  
Uhura managed to give him a polite, distracted smile before she tapped the receiver. The conversation took place entirely in clipped monosyllables that gave away nothing.   
  
“No… Yes… Yes… I will.”  
  
No sooner had Uhura disconnected than the door of the turbolift slid open. Sulu had almost expected to have been escorted from the building, but Uhura, whose face was professionally blank, didn’t even step off the turbolift. She managed to an obviously rehearsed line about Sulu being welcomed to spend as much time as he wanted gambling before shook his hand, commanded the turbolift doors to close, and disappeared from sight.  
  
\---  
  
Jim wouldn’t remember it later, but the sight of the carnage wasn’t the first thing he noticed when he paused inside the dimly lit store.   
  
Before his eyes adjusted, before he took his first breath, Jim heard the music that drifted from the unseen speakers. A long dead crooner sang about how the best was yet to come and Jim was suddenly seven, sitting on the porch on a hot summer day while the same song drifted out the windows of his house. His mom had been inside ~~(passed out)~~ sleeping on the couch, so Sam had snuck some ice pops out of the freezer and they ate them while they looked at the skeleton of the new casino rising in the distance over the fields of wheat, the juice sticky on their fingers and faces.   
  
It was one of his best memories.   
  
(Winona had had an odd obsession with old Terran music, and Jim’s childhood had been filled with songs by the likes of Frank Sinatra and Johnny Cash and David Bowie until one of her boyfriends destroyed the records and most of their belongings in a burning pile on his front lawn.)  
  
Time suspended for an infinite moment as the memory overlapped with the present and Frank Sinatra told both Jims that they had seen the sun but they hadn’t seen it shine. As right as the song was, as much as it had fit when he had been seven, it was viscerally wrong for the older Jim. Unable to reconcile the two, Jim was ripped away from his memory and back into reality. The song continued to float lazily out of the speakers, but Jim realized he could also hear the canned moaning noises of a porno playing on a vidscreen somewhere out of view, the rattling noise of a failing air handler.  
  
Then, all that Jim could hear was the sound of his own lungs drawing air, his heartbeat pounding in his ears. The few steps he had taken into the shop had brought him face to face with the divider that was meant to separate customer from cashier, a thin pane of transparent aluminum decorated with flickering holos for strip clubs and massage parlors. Jim could see his face in the reflection, the blue of his eyes highlighted by the desperate, dripping blue fingerprints that had been smeared across the phaser-proof barrier.  
  
There was something on the floor beyond it that Jim didn’t want to see, something horrible and raw. Jim watched from somewhere far away from his body as he stood stock still in front of the divider and tried and failed to identify what it had been, unable to get more specific than ‘humanoid.’ The air was thick with the cloying scent of fresh flesh and death and Jim couldn’t force himself to look away.  
  
It wasn’t the first time that he’d seen a corpse. Far from it. But the gleefully mutilated remains on the other side of the divider spoke of a methodical sociopathy that made Jim’s bones go cold and brittle. No phaser was built to do that type of precision damage and Jim knew from experience (the smell of burning flesh wasn’t nearly as bad as everybody said it was) that plasma knives cauterized the wounds they inflicted. Whoever had turned the sex store into a slaughterhouse had done so slowly, meticulously, and Jim imagined a faceless monster crooning gently to its victim about how _the best is yet to come, come the day your mine_ as it delicately unraveled organs and tissue.   
  
Jim turned to leave. He knew he had to warn Spock that shit had just taken a turn for the worse and that they needed to go, but no sooner had Jim turned his head than he heard something move behind him. Nerves already strung tight, Jim drew his phaser and spun back around, finger tight on the trigger, only to find…nothing. There was nothing except the sound of his own shallow breathing and the mellow voice of Frank Sinatra and the tinny sound of some second-rate porn star moaning ‘ _fuck me harder_ ’ and the wet, scraping noise as the body behind the counter twitched on the stained linoleum floor.  
  
Jim blinked rapidly and shut his eyes. When he opened them again the corpse was still and Jim had to fight down the hysterical laugher that threatened to bubble up within him. There was no way that whatever it was could still be alive. He was hallucinating. He had to be. The hair on the back of his neck was standing on end but his finger relaxed on the trigger and let out a shaky breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. He pinched the bridge of his nose and stared at his worn sneakers for a moment while he tried to calm his pounding heart. Then he looked up.   
  
Looking up was a bad idea. Jim watched, clear as day, as the body behind the counter spasmed and convulsed and made a low gurgling noise out of what must have once been its mouth.  
  
Jim dropped the package and turned around and walked out the door.  
Spock looked at him with Jim had tentatively classified as Vulcan Face #12: Annoyed Concern as he approached, no doubt wondering why Jim’s hands held neither the envelope or the credits he was supposed to exchange it for and Jim was not having it.  
  
“We need to leave now” Jim barely recognized his own voice, flat and cold as he slumped into the passenger seat. He suddenly felt very, very calm.   
  
“Mr. Kirk, if-“  
  
“It’s a goddamn horror show, Spock. There’s nobody in there and there’s blood all over the damn place.” Jim had lied without thinking about it, didn’t want to have to try and explain what he had seen to Spock, didn’t want to think about it at all. “We need to call somebody. The cops.”  
  
Spock sat stock still for a second, looking at Jim and obviously calculating something in that big Vulcan brain of his.  
  
“I will make the call.” Spock retrieved a small handset from one of the chest pockets on his jacket and flipped it open before he continued “Please retrieve the package and return immediately.”  
  
Before Jim could push the issue, Spock looked away from him and raised the handset to one pointed ear. As much as he wanted to get the hell away from whatever was in that shop, Jim knew that leaving the package behind was probably a bad idea – even if the cops were bought, such auspicious evidence would be difficult to ignore. Plus, Jim suddenly realized, the damn envelope was covered with his fingerprints. With his record, he was in the perfect position to be scapegoated for whatever the hell had happened in there. For once in his life Jim decided to do what he was told, shut his mouth, grit his teeth, and went.   
  
The thing behind the counter didn’t move again.  
  
\---  
  
That night, Hikaru ran an errand before he went to Pavel’s.   
  
He stopped by his apartment to change out of his uniform and choke down a few meal bars, sitting in his only chair as he watched the news. Hikaru didn’t bother keeping the place particularly clean, and the light from the setting suns caught on the dust motes that danced and swirled through his living room.   
  
The leading news story was about the Aces High murder. Hikaru tuned it out, looking at nothing as he peeled back the shiny wrapper and wolfed down his impromptu diner. The guys at the station had more than caught him up on all the gory details, and Hikaru really didn’t care about whatever bullshit theories the newscasters were spouting. It wasn’t as if everybody didn’t already know who had done it, even if it was a little too gruesome for Pike’s usual M.O. Hikaru thought back to the crime scene photos that had been taped up in the ready room with a shudder. Whoever Pike had hired had been disgustingly thorough, and it was a stark reminder to Hikaru that he needed to watch himself.   
  
If Pike ever found out what Hikaru was up to … he could only pray that Pike would go as easy on him.  
  
Done eating, Hikaru recycled his garbage and retrieved a small black stone from the back of his sock drawer. There had been six identical stones when Hikaru had arrived on Iankt Prime. Four remained, not counting the one that Hikaru had chosen for a moment and shoved into his pocket. He left the house and drove into the desert, squinting his eyes in the deepening dusk.  
  
Hikaru hadn’t been born on Iankt, but he had spent enough of his childhood there that he hadn’t ever really appreciated the landscape until he had come back. What had once been a featureless black desert had somehow become beautiful. The rolling dunes and the craggy outcrops that lined the highway after he had driven out past the old farming districts were a welcome relief from the ugly, utilitarian development of the city. It was almost enchanting, especially in the low evening light, but Hikaru knew that the desert had its own secrets.   
  
There were a lot of holes in the desert. A lot of problems had been buried in those holes.  
  
Hikaru pulled his cruiser off the road and shut off the engine, but didn’t bother taking his keys out of the ignition or locking the doors. His errand wasn’t going to take long. He walked a couple of meters from the car and dug the rock from his pocket, held his breath as he pressed his thumb to the bottom. For a moment nothing happened, but then the rock gave a slight beep. It hummed almost imperceptibly as it began to transmit.   
  
\---  
  
Uhura had all but disappeared after Pike had finished talking to Sulu, and while Pike had continued to receive hourly updates via his PADD, they had been short and terse and secondhand. They were types of updates Uhura sent when she was otherwise occupied, busy chatting with the thieves and conmen who still thought they had a chance at robbing the Enterprise. Incidents like those were a lot less common than they had been at the start of Pike’s career in the casino business, but they still happened often enough that Pike wasn’t distressed by Uhura’s lack of communication.   
  
Whatever it was, Uhura was taking care of it. Pike had enough trust in her that he didn’t bother worrying about it – he knew he would he the full story later. Instead, he was left free to slog absentmindedly through paperwork while reflected on his earlier conversation with Sulu. Hopefully the cop would be smart enough to take Pike’s first offer.  
  
Pike had just pressed his thumb to the screen of his PADD to approve of the food and beverage budget for the next quarter when he heard the soft chime alerting him to the turbolift’s approach. Seconds later the doors slid open, and Uhura crossed the room with purposeful strides, ever-present PADD tucked under her arm. When she didn’t return the smile he gave her, Pike began to doubt his initial assessment of her disappearance, a doubt that only increased when she stopped in front of his desk and said  
  
“We need to talk.”  
  
“Alright,” Pike set the paperwork-laden PADD to the side and clasped his hands together on the desk “what do we need to talk about?”  
  
“Nero’s been busy.” She tapped a manicured finger on the screen of her PADD before she turned it and set it carefully on his desk. Pike observed the images that were displayed, face blank as he took in the gory tableau on the screen  
  
“This guy, Gareb, was found earlier today. Two of Scotty’s men went to make a delivery; from what the coroner says, they probably missed Nero by no more than a couple of minutes.” She crossed her arms over her chest and looked at Pike critically “You might not be able to tell from the picture, but he was Andorian.”  
  
“Fuck.” Pike actually hadn’t been able to tell the species of whatever poor bastard Nero had flayed, although the blue blood had narrowed his choices. Whatever features might have once identified the humanoid in the picture had been peeled away along with the majority of its skin. Pike scrubbed a hand across the side of his face and through his short hair. “The Andorians are going to be pissed. You know what they’re like.”   
  
Uhura ignored his rhetorical statement.  
  
“I went in the back with the coroners. Checked the place over, destroyed the surveillance footage, made sure there was nothing there that could have been traced back to you.” She retrieved her PADD from his desk “Any flak from the Andorian embassy should go straight to the Governor and the cops.”  
  
That, at least, was a relief. Even if the Andorians suspected that Pike had been tangentially involved in the murder of one of their nationals - which they probably would - it didn’t matter unless there was a clear link. Pike tried not to sound too relieved when he responded “So it’s not that bad then.”  
  
“No, it’s bad. You saw the pictures.” Uhura said “Nero cut him in ways I haven’t seen since Tarsus IV.”  
  
Uhura paused for a moment and Pike took advantage of the opportunity to lean back in his chair with a tired sigh.   
  
“Has he tried to contact us again?” Pike folded his hands in his lap and looked at them hard  
  
“Does he even need to?” Uhura didn’t give Pike an opportunity to respond when he looked up to ask her just what in the hell that was supposed to mean. “Nero’s trying to prove a point. You know that. He’s trying to remind you that his money built this place” she pinned him with her eyes but Pike refused to look away “and not the other way around.”  
  
“Well I think he’s made his goddamn point. Hopefully now he’ll leave.”  
  
“You know he’s insane, right?” Uhura asked, and Pike felt his eyes widen slightly at the blunt honesty of her statement “He’s not going to stop until you either kiss his ass and shutdown all of the side businesses or fight back.”  
  
“And what the hell would you know about it?” Pike snapped, feeling trapped by the truth in her statements. God, he was constantly underestimating Uhura. How the hell did she know so much?   
  
“You may have forgotten” Uhura may as well have read Pike’s mind from her response, looking completely unfazed although her voice had gone cold “but this is not my first time dealing with murderers and madmen.”  
  
Pike was a man who deeply valued having lots of options, contingency plans for his contingency plans, but Nero had never afforded him that luxury. From where Pike sat, his options were severely limited.   
  
“Jesus Christ, Uhura.” He said. And then “We don’t have the resources to start a war with Nero’s people.”  
  
“I can make some calls” their eyes were still locked, but Uhura’s voice had softened “I know some people on-”  
  
Pike held up a hand to stop her “I don’t know why we still bother with plausible deniability, but you should stop there.” He pinched the bridge of his nose, squeezing his eyes shut against the headache that was slowly but surely growing in his skull. “Go ahead. Make some calls, see what you can find out, but don’t move on anything.”   
  
When Uhura didn’t respond Pike hazarded a glance, cracking an eye open, and saw everything he needed to know in her eyes. “Just information, Uhura, this isn’t a worst case scenario. For now, tell Scotty and the boys to tighten up. I don’t want a war if we can avoid it.”   
  
She nodded and excused herself, and Pike watched as she left, disappeared into the turbolift as the dusk light poured through the windows to paint fiery streaks on her back. Pike didn’t move for a long time, watching the colors of the failing light play across the empty office, his mind a wreck of memories and worries, and the faint bubbling of the fountain sounded like nothing so much as the steady fracturing of the world.  
  
\---  
  
 _ **Twenty Six Years Ago**  
  
They met in the shadow of the cliff, looking out over what Chris jokingly called Christmas Canyon. The ravine was a bright, jagged cut through the desert, its walls red and green due to the minerals that made up the rock faces. It was beautiful and jarring – the first time Chris had seen it, he had almost been convinced that he was hallucinating, an acid flashback to his pre-Academy days. When asked what he saw in “the remote little shit-burg of a planet” that was Iankt Prime, Christopher had tried to describe the way that Christmas Canyon looked, sparkling in the sun, the feverish beauty of the black sand dunes that crept all the way down to the sea, the promise he saw when he looked around their tiny settlement.   
  
Christopher Pike had big dreams for Iankt Prime. The only problem was, not many people believed in them.  
  
The suns were high in the sky when Chris arrived, parking his hoverbike next to George’s faded truck. He was the last to arrive, and as he dismounted the vehicle he saw them all waiting for him, looking contrary and confused in the heat. It was what passed for winter on Iankt Prime, which meant only that the nights were colder than normal while the days remained sweltering. The four of them looked at Chris critically, obviously hoping for an explanation as to why they were all meeting outside in the middle of nowhere during the hottest part of the day.  
  
“Nero rescheduled out meeting.”  
  
“What the hell, _Governor _Pike?” That was James Komack, looking as surly as ever with his hands stuffed in his back pockets, already starting to go bald. “You brought us all the way out here to tell us_ that _?”  
  
Chris gave him a rueful smile, let the silence hang for a long moment before he responded.  
  
“No. I brought you all the way out here because out meeting hall is being bugged by the Federation.” Chris said.  
  
Winona’s mouth fell open in shock and she clutched George’s hand. James and Gretchen just looked at him like they thought he was crazy.  
  
“You mean one of us? What the fuck, Chris, we’ve always stuck together.” Gretchen Lui looked mad enough to spit, and Pike hated that he had to wonder if it was because she was overcompensating for guilt.  
  
What she said, at least, was true. They had all met at the Academy, young and bright and disillusioned by Starfleet’s increasingly militaristic nature. When they had enlisted it had been with the intent to serve in a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada, exploring new worlds and enhancing the Federation’s knowledge of the universe. Reality turned out to be a lot different than the promotional pamphlets and the smooth words of their recruiters.  
  
“You think I don’t know that, Gretch? It doesn’t change the facts.”   
  
Chris had given up his spot on the USS Sarajevo to start this remote colony of washouts and idealists. He knew the facts. He knew that they had all been pouring their blood, sweat, and tears into the colony for two years, trying to force it to succeed through sheer power of will. He knew that they were on the cusp of something big, something that would either make or break the struggling Iankt Prime colony.   
  
It was a lot to deal with. Chris was governor, the founder, the oldest of the core crew, but he was still young. They all were. Chris knew that he was sacrificing their once rigid morals for success, knew that if the Federation found out what they were up to they would all end up dead. Either that or they would end up doing time on some frozen hellhole of an outpost, wishing they had been put out of their miseries. It was all on _his _shoulders, not theirs, and his back was breaking.  
  
“I don’t want you guys to worry. It may not be one of us.” That was almost surely a lie, but Chris wanted to play his cards close to his chest until he knew for sure. If James’ scoff was anything to go by, Chris wasn’t fooling anyone. The five of them were the only ones who knew about the plan with Nero. “Just stay frosty and don’t talk about anything classified at the office, okay?”  
  
The rest of the meeting was spent talking about business - what they wanted to discuss with Nero, how many settlers had let their visas expire, the New Year’s festival, the renovation of the aqueduct system. It was no different than the meetings they had every week, but although they all argued like normal and tried to act relaxed, Chris could see the suspicious glances that they traded amongst themselves. Hell, he realized those looks because he was doing more than a fair share of observation himself.  
  
Pike hadn’t fully realized it then, although some small part of him must have known, that the odd sensation he felt in the pit of his stomach was the feeling of all of his dreams and youthful idealism slipping away, sliding between his fingers like so many grains of fine, black sand._  
  
\---  
  
No sooner had Spock pulled the vehicle out of the parking lot and onto the street than Jim heard the wail of sirens rising in the distance. Jim wouldn’t have thought it was possible, but even more adrenaline had dumped into his veins at the sound, his instinct and experience telling him to run even though he had done nothing wrong. Well, not the type of wrong the cops were interested in. Spock had remained calm and emotionless as ever, pulled patiently to the side of the narrow road to wait as the cop cars screeched by.   
  
They had tacos for lunch.  
  
Spock got some crazy vegetable combination and Jim got beef. Well, at least what the menu said was beef. Either way, it was delicious. They ate without speaking at a picnic table under the awning of the taco cart, drinking water out of plastic cups and trying to stay cool in the shade. Jim swore quietly to himself as he tried t o corral errant pieces of meat and scoops of _pico de gallo_ with tortilla chips. Spock, of course, was fastidiously neat. Not even a single shred of lettuce escaped.  
  
At least, they didn’t until a car backfired a block away. Jim barely saw Spock’s hand twitch before the crunchy shell of his taco was obliterated and a cascade of vegetables had avalanched down the front of his neat white shirt. Spock hadn’t seemed particularly bothered that the tomatoes had stained his clothes, and seemed even less concerned that the wide red swath that made it look like somebody had tried to disembowel him. When Jim tried to point it out Spock had simply shaken his head.   
  
Vulcans bled green, not red, so Jim’s comparison was invalid.  
  
It still made Jim slightly uncomfortable, catching the red smear out of the corner of his eye as they tossed their garbage and made their way back to the car. The next drop-off had been at a souvenir stand and the blazed kid behind the counter couldn’t have cared less about Jim grabbing one of the shirts off the rack. While Jim strongly suspected that Spock had only given in to shut him up, it was totally worth getting the Vulcan death glare to see Spock wearing a shirt with an airbrushed picture of a sunset beach.  
  
Jim and Spock finished their deliveries as if nothing had happened, cruising around town and dropping off the unregistered phasers at strip clubs and at pawn shops, exchanging envelopes for credits behind 24-hour diners and outside of the radio station. The mysterious black box went to the owner of a chop shop and most of the electronic components were stuffed into the suitcase of a Ferengi businessman with a transport to catch. As the day ended and their deliveries dwindled, the cardboard box at Jim’s feet had been steadily refilled with rubber-banded rolls of credits.   
  
It had surprised Jim on his first day, taking paper credits instead of electronic transfers, but the more he thought about it the more it made sense. No transaction record, no worries that their credit chips would get flagged, not to mention being easier to launder.  
  
It was a nice coincidence that the rolls of bills managed to hide the solitary undeliverable envelope that lurked at the bottom of the box.  
  
The suns were sinking beneath the horizon when Spock dropped Jim off in his driveway, taking a flat envelope out of the center console and handing it to Jim with a stern reminder that they would start no later than eight the next morning. Jim just grinned and told him to stay frosty as he shoved the envelope in his back pocket and trudged up the gravel driveway to the door of the trailer.   
Ninety percent of Jim’s job included sitting on his ass in a car, but he would be damned if he didn’t get done each day feeling absolutely exhausted.  
  
Bones’ crappy little car was missing from the driveway, but Jim was hardly surprised – another one of the doctors at the clinic had quit, and Bones kept taking the extra shifts even after Jim had gotten his ‘promotion.’ Sure enough, Bones had left a message on the interface telling Jim that “these assholes couldn’t teach kudzu to grow. Don’t wait up for me, kid.” Jim didn’t know what assholes he was talking about, but it didn’t really matter.  
  
Jim switched the vidscreen over to the news before making his way into the tiny kitchen. In the back of one of the cabinets was a can of decaf coffee that Jim had bought on accident and Bones had refused to look at. It had done nothing more than collect dust for months, but days before Jim had dug it out, wiped it off, and poured the coffee down the recycler. The can still lived on the top shelf of the corner cabinet, all the way in the back, but it had taken on a new importance for Jim.   
  
As the news anchor droned on about the weather forecast (Wednesday: hot and dry, Thursday: hot and dry, Friday: very hot and extra dry), Jim dug the envelope Spock had handed him out of his back pocket, splitting it open with his pinky before he stood up on his tiptoes and reached back to retrieve the can. Some of the money went back in Jim’s pocket but most of it was added to the small but growing collection in the can. The envelope went in the recycler.   
  
It was all very twentieth century, keeping money in a can. Jim had actually gotten the idea from an ancient holovid, but Bones would have noticed if their savings started to suddenly increase exponentially from the few lonely credits that kept it open.  
  
Shoving a prepackaged meal in the rehydrator, Jim grabbed a beer from the fridge and wandered into what passed as the living room. Jim wasn’t really paying attention to whatever the sports caster was so excited about, and he stared unseeing at the vidscreen while he waited for his dinner to be done, sipping erratically from the plastic beer bottle. The trailer had been nice once, when it had been assigned to Bones as a temporary living arrangement after he had moved to Iankt, but time had taken its toll despite their attempts at upkeep.  
  
The dowser was on the fritz, coughing and sputtering, and Jim couldn’t help but wonder if everything in the damned trailer was falling apart.  
  
“Earlier today, the body of an Andorian national was found in the Aces High Adult Warehouse. Sources say that the body had been mutila-” Jim hadn’t even realized what he was doing until he had crossed the room and shut off the screen, shoulders tight, beer bottle slippery in his clenched hand. There was a cheery beep from the kitchen, and Jim sighed, pressing cool bottle to his head.   
  
He ate standing, with his elbows braced on the counter as he looked out the kitchen window. The macaroni and cheese was gritty and mostly tasteless but he ate it anyway, shoveling it into his mouth while his mind was elsewhere.   
  
There was a holo on the windowsill, Bones and Jocelyn and Joanna at a Founder’s Festival, holding puffy clouds of cotton candy, blue and pink and yellow, smiling at the camera. Shortly after they had moved in together, Jim had positioned a small pot of fake flowers so that Jocelyn was mostly obscured . Bones hadn’t said anything. Every so often, though, Bones would get drunk and throw the flowerpot, would sit on the couch holding the holo and tell Jim about how it had been _her_ idea to move to the colony when she had found out she was pregnant, how hard _he_ had tried to make it work, how _she_ had taken everything and bankrupted him to buy the tickets off-planet, how _she_ had taken _his_ daughter and basically marooned him on the shitty excuse for a colony.  
  
Jim would sit and listen and drink and he would pry holo out of Bones’ weak fingers when the doctor eventually passed out. On those nights Jim would tuck Bones in on the couch and retrieve the flowerpot (it was plastic, he had learned that lesson after Bones had shattered the first one) before he followed Bones’ lead and drank himself to sleep.  
  
Those nights were bad, but Jim thought it was somehow almost worse to be so completely alone in the empty trailer. He was a social creature, but whether it was out of an intrinsic need for interaction or due to a desire to keep his own thoughts at bay, Jim didn’t know.  
  
Darkness had fallen in while he ate, and when Jim turned away from the window he realized that he needed to squint his eyes to see. It wasn’t really a problem for mobility – Jim navigated the trailer in pitch blackness on an almost nightly basis – but the sudden dimness reminded him of another dark interior and he grit his teeth. There was a list in his mind stamped with the label “Things Jim Kirk Doesn’t Think About,” but occasionally sense memories disrupted his usual success in not thinking about things on that list.   
  
The smell of hot tar. The feel of rock dust in his nose. The taste of polyurethane.   
  
A few quick taps on the control panel turned on every light in the trailer, but Jim sincerely hoped that he wouldn’t have to think about what he had seen that afternoon every time he walked into a dim room.  
  
Bones had told him not to wait up, but Jim didn’t have anything better to do so he grabbed his tools from the closet and set about trying to fix the dowser. Jim stuck his spanner between his teeth as he wriggled the panel that concealed the inner workings of the dowser, freeing it with a faint pop and leaning it against the wall as he looked at the bundles of wires and sleek tubes inside. He felt vaguely like a superhero facing down an old villain.  
  
Once upon a time, the vapor condensation apparatus had revolutionized planet colonization – no longer did settlers need to be located next to sources of clean water, they could just whisk it out of the air! At least, they could on planets where there was humidity. Planets that were not Iankt Prime.  
  
No amount of tinkering with what Bones called “that infernal machine” could put more water vapor in the air, and most of Jim’s time was dedicated to making sure that water came out of the faucet at all. He briefly thanked whatever benevolent force existed for sonic showers – even if they worked together, all of the dowsers on Iankt couldn’t have mustered up enough water pressure for a decent traditional shower.  
  
Time quickened around Jim when his mind was occupied, and before he knew it he was glancing at the clock only to find that the night had mostly slipped away and he was only a half hour away from 14pm. Bones was due home any minute. Replacing the panel, Jim stretched and yawned before turning off most of the lights and heading towards the bathroom, stripping off his shirt in the doorway.   
  
Scratching absently at his shoulder, he toed off his socks and added them to the pile before he turned to the tiny bathroom’s sink. For a moment Jim wasn’t looking at his reflection in the mirror but through it, through the filthy barrier to where a raw, flayed thing twitched on the floor in a pool of blue. Then it was gone. Jim stared at himself in the mirror for a long time before his breathing evened out and he felt confident enough to step forward and grab his toothbrush.  
  
Somewhere far away he heard to door to the trailer creak open, the thump of a bag being set on the counter followed by Bones’ heavy, uneven footsteps. Jim listened to the sounds of Bones moving around in the kitchen as he hunched forward to stare into the bowl of the sink and scrub at his teeth, but his breath caught when Bones’ footsteps were muffled by the carpet, his eyes flicking up to the mirror. Of course there was nobody there, Jim chided himself as he continued to brush, just the reflection of the empty doorway and the hallway beyond. Bones would never sneak up on his like that and of course there was nobody besides him and Bones in the trailer.  
  
Jim spit out the last of the foam seconds before a light knock sounded from the doorframe. That time, when Jim looked up in the mirror he saw Bones standing in the doorway with his arms crossed against his chest and a low, suggestive smile on his face. Jim smiled back as his hands deftly tore off a string of dental floss, moving out of habit more than intention, and wrapped it around his fingers. The smile looked too unsteady and forced to Jim’s eyes, but if Bones noticed he didn’t say anything, stepping forward press to his clothed chest against Jim’s exposed back.  
  
The solid line of Bones’ body behind him caused Jim’s skin to tingle, little thrills of pleasure that only intensified when Bones skimmed his finger tips across his exposed ribs. Jim leaned his head back against Bones’ shoulder, and what was meant to be an exhale turned into a sharp gasp of pleasure when Bones suddenly scraped his fingernails across Jim’s side, humming faintly as he buried his head against Jim’s neck.  
  
“You almost done?” Bones murmured, as he pressed a scalding kiss with just a hint of teeth against the sweet spot on Jim’s collar. There was really only one answer to that type of question and Jim did his best to nod as Bones laved his tongue against the same spot before stepping away with a wicked grin and disappearing down the hallway.  
  
Jim tasted gritty fake mint and blood as he looked past himself in the mirror.


	4. Interlude - Nero

Nero sat cross-legged in the sand and looked down over the edge of the cliff as he worked, surrounded by the sighing sounds of the night. The spacedock hung low over the sprawling city, a false moon in the cloudless black sky, suspended above the streets below, veins that pulsed and glowed with tiny vehicles as they snaked through the settlement.   
  
They all fed into the heart of the Iankt, where the Enterprise rose glittering into the dark. Nero had never held and affection for the planet or its denizens, but seeing it laid out in front of him, twisted and fetid, irreparably corrupt, was almost enough to bring a fond smile to his face. Nero sharpened his blade, and the high whine of stone on steel rang out clearly in the quiet night. The suns had set long before, but the black desert still radiated waves of baking heat. Breathing deeply, Nero let the warmth spread through him, through his legs and torso, up into his body, out of the crown of his shaven head and back into the universe. He felt it as it danced along his neurons and tickled through the secret places in his liver.  
  
Ayel and Hyifd stood behind him and to the side, keeping watch. They had parked just beyond the edge of the field and Nero could hear the low hum of the vehicle’s engine as it sat idling. Neither had questioned Nero when he had asked to drive to the remote outcrop, and Ayel had made sure to lose the tail that Pike had put on them without being asked. Nero’s eyes narrowed as he focused his gaze at the top of the Enterprise.   
  
Christopher was being very foolish. Nero needed to make sure he learnt his lesson.  
  
Nero hummed along with the killing tune the _kaleh_ sang as he drew the stone across it. The knife had belonged to his wife’s mother, grandmother, great grandmother, before it had passed to Mandana. It would have belonged to his eldest daughter, before. It had passed to him instead. Few outside of the Star Empire would have recognized it for what it was, the ceremonial woman’s blade, but Nero wouldn’t have cared even if they did. He carried it with honor. He used it to do the good work.  
  
Ayel cleared his throat. It wasn’t particularly loud, but it still sounded thunderous in the still, quiet night. It wasn’t a sound of alarm or warning, just an interjection on his otherwise peaceful evening. Nero sighed, but while he set the sharpening stone in the sand in front of him his grip only tightened on the handle of the knife.   
  
“Is something bothering you, Ayel?” Nero’s voice was colored by annoyance but he stopped himself from lashing out.   
  
“No sir.” his second-in-command replied automatically. “Dust.”  
  
Nero _hmm_ ed under his breath as he stared down at the twinkling lights, satisfied by the explanation. Ayel was a good soldier. He had followed Nero into the Black countless times. Nero didn’t doubt his loyalty or his honesty, but his once mild distaste for Christopher Pike and his ilk had metamorphosed into a low, pelvic hunger, a burning that could never be satisfied.  
  
“They are animals, Ayel, and that is how they must be treated.” Nero said, testing the edge of his blade against the back of his wrist. His mind was teeth without a mouth; his thoughts were marrow without bone. The humans would go out of this world as they had come into it. Screaming, covered in blood.  
  
He hissed as the blade drew drops of green blood from the new cut on his arm, teased the wound open with the tip of the knife to encourage the flow. It was ritualistic, although part of no tradition known outside of Nero’s own twisted mind. The backs of his hands and wrists were a litany of paper-thin scars, self-inflicted trophies of the hunt. Nero breathed deep, inhaled the smell of matrix, and watched as his blood dripped onto the stained sharpening stone.  
  
“They are sick, and we must put them down.”


	5. Part Three

At first Jim didn’t know what was happening.   
  
He was walking through a dark room, freezing cold and surrounded by enormous lamps, a forest of huge columnar fixtures that were too wide to wrap his arms around and at least twice his height. They glowed dimly in the otherwise pitch blackness, vaguely reminiscent of warp cores. Dark and vast, the room’s walls and ceiling weren’t visible, and Jim got the distinct impression that they didn’t exist at all, that he could continue to walk through the forest of glowing blue columns for the rest of his life without ever reaching the edge.  
  
When he had passed by one of the columns he paused, bathed in the blue glow, and squinted through the glass to see that it was filled with thousands of tiny jellyfish. None of the creatures were more than an inch wide, and they drifted languidly through the water that filled the tank, perfect miniatures that looked tissue paper thin and as light and fragile as spun glass. The jellyfish glowed, blue, and as Jim watched, two of them bumped together, tentacles intertwining for a brief moment before they separated, drifting away from one another. Jim shook his head, suddenly uncomfortable, and moved on.  
  
He must have walked past hundreds of columns, the billions of tiny jellyfish inside of them, not knowing where he was or where he was going until he turned a corner that was not there and found himself in a bright white room. It was plain, featureless, and when Jim turned around there was no sign of the room with the jellyfish at all. But when he had turned back there was a shock of bright red feathers drifting weightless in the air. The feathers were unaffected by gravity, twirling in space but refusing to fall to the floor. They were small, fluffy, and although Jim could not see the bird that had lost them, he could clearly hear it chirping.  
  
Chirping.  
  
Jim reached out to touch a feather and opened his eyes in the dark of the bedroom. The ether of the dream was gone instantly, and Jim became aware of his surroundings immediately. The sheets tangled around his feet. The ceiling fan turning lazily above his head. The weight of Bones’ arm slung across his chest. The red glow of his communicator on the nightstand as it chirped.  
  
Fighting the urge to groan, Jim reached out and snagged it. The tiny bedroom would have been pitch black if not for the glowing comm., and Jim had to squint as his pupils adjusted to the light. The upper left corner showed a glowing clock, cheerfully displaying the fact that it was two in the morning. An [URGENT MESSAGE] alert was glowing on the screen. Sender: Sp0ck.   
  
(Jim had programmed the name like that on purpose, that first day, simply to annoy Spock. He’d gotten an eyebrow raise out of it and had considered the mission a success.)   
  
The groan finally escaped, but Jim’s initial annoyance had been run through by undercurrents of worry. Spock wouldn’t have called him in the middle of the night unless it was important. Some type of emergency. After the events of the day before, Jim’s mind tumbled through scores of increasingly unlikely but horrifying possibilities.  
  
A bystander had seen their car leave the parking lot. The cops had found Jim’s fingerprints at the crime scene. A corpse had disappeared from the colony morgue, leaving a trail of bloody blue footprints heading in the direction of Jim’s neighborhood.  
  
Jim tapped the glowing alert with his thumb – there was no sense in postponing the inevitable.  
  
 _Work cancelled today. 8am tomorrow._  
  
After what Jim had been anticipating, it was the best kind of disappointment. He slid his thumb across the screen, closing the message, and tossed the comm back on the nightstand. Bones didn’t have to go in until second shift. Maybe they could actually eat a meal together for once or something. Within minutes Jim was back asleep, dreaming of nothing more than a soft, enveloping blackness and the promise of an unexpected day off.  
  
Jim would sleep deep deeply for hours, undisturbed even when Bones slid out of bed and padded into the kitchen to make his morning coffee.  
  
\---  
  
Solar days on Iankt Prime were longer than the standard Terran solar day by about six hours. Hikaru remembered learning about it in school, about how it had made the colonization viable in the otherwise difficult environment, how it wasn’t enough of a change to seriously disturb human circadian rhythms. After all, what was six hours compared to the seventy hours days on Simbi 8 or the endless night on Carrefor?  
  
What Hikaru had never fully appreciated in school, however, was how uniquely employers could shoehorn bizarre work shifts into a thirty hour day.   
  
Hikaru groaned as the ever-insistent beeping of his comm alarm roused him from his cold, dreamless sleep. Still in the process of waking up, he rolled to snag the device and jolted in surprise when, instead of knocking into his bedside table, his hand slapped ineffectively at floor. Sleep-dim, it took his brain a moment to process where he was, but by the time he fished his comm out from where it was wedged half beneath the mattress, Sulu remembered that he had stayed at Pavel’s again.  
  
Pavel, who was nowhere to be found.  
  
Wishing he could roll over and go back to sleep, Hikaru lurched up gracelessly, off of the mattress and into the bathroom. He twisted the sink handle, remembering a moment too late that Pavel’s dowser was completely shot, and was rewarded with nothing but a dry, angry cough of air from the faucet. Hikaru grimaced and grabbed the plastic jug of water from where it sat on the edge of the counter, taking a slug of the tepid, grainy water.  
  
Some time later, after a quick sonic shower and a mostly successful collection of clothes (one sock was still at large), Hikaru wandered into what passed as the kitchen in Pavel’s tiny house. It wasn’t much more than a mismatched collection of appliances and a short, scorched countertop, but it worked. Except when it didn’t.   
  
In the week that Hikaru had been all but living at Pavel’s they had only made one bonafide attempt to cook, a disaster that had ended with Hikaru ordering takeout. Still, it got the job done when it came to heating up the prepackaged meals that Pavel favored and Hikaru managed to choke down gamely. San Francisco had spoiled him for food, so much better than the bland, prepackaged homogeny he had grown up with, had been eating consistently since his return to Iankt Prime.  
  
Adjacent to the kitchen was a small living room, a room that could have easily been cramped save for the fact that it was empty except for the lilting card table where they ate their meals and two mismatched futons sitting on the patchy carpet. It was on one of those futons - the red one with the questionable stains - that Hikaru found Pavel.   
  
Pavel’s head was tilted back against the worn fabric, glazed eyes staring at nothing, and Hikaru could see his chest rising and falling as he took short, rapid breaths. It was still dark, but Hikaru’s eyes had long since adjusted to the low light, and he was able to see the details quite clearly, to observe with clinical detachment the way Pavel’s hands lay palm up next to his knees, fingers spasming, the way his works were spread around him like offerings at the shrine of some sallow deity.   
  
None of it was shocking or new to him. Hikaru had watched his sister use throughout his senior year of high school, had grown accustomed to returning home after long afternoons at Pavel’s to find her sprawled on the couch, the floor, the lawn chair in the backyard where she would later go shuffling out of life.  
  
Hikaru had gone through a not insignificant amount of training, but he couldn’t tell what, exactly, Pavel had been smoking. It was useless to try and guess without a scanner – the official Federation list of illicit substances was not so much a list as an enormous database, and that wasn’t even including the drugs used exclusively by non-humanoids. Leave it to Pavel, though, to get high in the most archaic way possible. Hell, half the homeless addicts Sulu picked up were carrying bootleg hyposprays. It was grimly amusing, like something out of an archaic holovid.  
  
He stood in the doorway for a long time, watching as Pavel’s frantic twitching eased and his breathing evened.   
  
Hikaru only turned away when Pavel eventually blinked and tried to focus his eyes, made a half-hearted attempt to raise his head. Hikaru went into the kitchen. He opened and closed the cabinets, and although he took a long time to study the labels on the few items he found there, he made no effort to eat. By the time he finished reading ingredients and made his way back to the futon, Pavel was sitting up and tapping more of the light brown powder onto his square of tinfoil.   
  
Pavel didn’t pause so much as go still when he sensed Hikaru standing in the doorway, kept his eyes down. When Hikaru stepped forward, intending to do nothing more than walk across the room and out the door, Pavel flinched backwards, shoulders hunching together protectively.  
  
It wasn’t as if the elephant in the room had ever been invisible to Hikaru, but he had been hoping that it wouldn’t turn green and start rampaging until he had his other business under control. The mission came first, he told himself, even though every instinct he had was screaming at him to go to Pavel and fight it out and somehow make him better, so that questions of who had left who behind ceased to matter and they could ride off into the sunset together.  
  
Hikaru looked down at his watch – he was already going to be late getting to the station. He told himself that he didn’t have time to confront Pavel (to face what he had been steadfastly ignoring for weeks), so he was surprised when he heard himself say  
  
“Fucking hell, Pavel” angry and low, following through on his original motion and striding towards the door.  
  
It wasn’t far, the room too small to need any significant amount to time to cross, but it still seemed to take an eternity. Hikaru was about halfway to the door when he heard Pavel call his name. Pavel’s voice was perfectly clear, neither soft nor faint nor apologetic. None of the things Hikaru had been ~~hoping for~~ expecting. If anything, Pavel just sounded tired and a little bit empty when he said  
  
“Can you pick me up from work today?”  
  
“Yeah” Hikaru said, and then “What time?”  
  
\---  
  
“What’s the news, Komack?”   
To say that Pike had gone to work early would have been a vast understatement. Unable to sleep, the day the still been dark and the suns had not even begun to peek over the horizon when he had pulled into the parking garage. Uhura hadn’t even arrived yet, and that was perhaps the best qualifier of just how early Pike had gone to work.  
  
The situation with Nero and the events of the day before weighed heavily on his mind, ruining any chance of sleep. It wasn’t as if he didn’t have enough to worry about, what with running the casino and colony politics and all the little shit that bogged him down on a day to day basis. Nero visiting the colony would have likely been enough to give Pike another ulcer even if the Romulan’s behavior hadn’t grown increasingly neurotic and obscene during his stay.  
  
A call from Komack was the absolute last thing Pike needed. He would have wondered what he had done to make the universe hate him so much, but Pike knew that the list was longer than he cared to think about.  
  
“That’s my Christopher, always straight to business.” While Komack’s propensity for sarcasm hadn’t changed, his body certainly had. Long since gone to seed in the comfort of Starfleet bureaucracy, it was still slightly bizarre for Pike to see his old acquaintance looking so…old. And fat. “What, your favorite sector representative can’t just call to chat?”  
  
“You _could_ , but both of us know you never do. Plus, my assistant already told me you have information for me.” Uhura hadn’t even looked surprised when she had arrived to find Pike behind his desk, a good four hours ahead of schedule.   
  
“Well, you know I have to look out for my favorite ex-Governor.” Pudgy and completely bald, Komack often dabbed at his forehead with a handkerchief when he spoke. Something about it made Pike vaguely uncomfortable to watch.  
  
“Why?” Neither of them was morally clean, but at least Pike hadn’t run off when things got difficult. At least he hadn’t given up his dream to ride on coattails and the bribes of lobbyists.   
  
“What the hell do you mean, why? Don’t start your paranoid psycho bullshit with me Chris. I’ve known you too long.” Komack hated having his motives questioned even more than Pike did, and bristled at the implication. And wasn’t that just like him, thinking that Pike should kneel out of gratefulness for whatever measly scraps of information Komack decided to give him. As if Pike didn’t have his own informants.  
  
“Yeah, Komack, we go way back, huh? That’s why you and Gretch let your visas expire without telling me.” Pike scowled, face thunderous “First George disappeared, then you two ran off…”  
  
“You know why we left, Pike.” Komack’s round face quivered with anger and things left unsaid “And this type of overreaction is exactly why we didn’t tell you first.”  
  
“I did not overreact. You know just as well as I do that having a steady population is key to the survival of a colony.”   
  
“Because the best way to do that was to make all your residents permanent citizens, no visa renewal required!” Komack threw his hands in the air, out of the range of the viewscreen “How much does it cost for a visa’d citizen to get off Iankt these days? Hmm?”  
  
Pike, who had been spoiling for the fight, suddenly found himself at a loss. Komack didn’t exactly have him by the balls, but he definitely had a point. This wasn’t the first time that they’d had this fight, and Pike suddenly wondered why he bothered at all. It was hard for Pike not to try to explain himself, to justify what he had done, but Komack had already heard everything he had to say.   
  
The only thing he could have done was to tell the truth, but that secret had been buried for a quarter of a decade. Instead, Pike just bit his tongue and kept quiet. Stared at the viewscreen. Komack was already going to be wallowing in self-righteousness; Pike didn’t need to add even more fuel.  
  
But instead of gloating, Komack just looked sad, sighing and steepling his fingers in front of his chest.  
  
“I didn’t call to argue with you. Like I said, I just called to tell you something that I heard.” Komack paused, looking slightly uneasy before he continued “Rumor around here is that you’ve got another ‘Fleeter in the house.”  
  
Everything went still. Pike didn’t think he had responded, but Komack kept talking. “People love to talk, Pike, I’m just telling you what I’ve heard.”   
  
“Yeah, sure.” Pike didn’t even know where to rank this new information on the scale of things that he needed to worry about. He was vaguely aware of continuing his conversation with Komack, but his mind raced as he tried to assess the situation. Unable to keep up with whatever Komack was blathering about (something about debauchery on Risa, unimportant), Pike hung up.  
  
It wasn’t as if there hadn’t been spies before – Starfleet had been trying to bring him down even before he had actually _done_ anything particularly bad. Hell, if anything it was Starfleet’s fault that Pike’s ambitions had turned out the way they had. Hearing that there was an informant wasn’t as bad as it sounded, not really, but Pike still felt his hands curl into fists beneath his desk  
  
Pike had grown adept at catching rats. That didn’t mean that he ever felt any less betrayed, that the taste it left in his mouth ever got any less sour.   
  
If this information was as recent as Komack was suggesting, then Pike’s investigation had already been narrowed significantly. Well, that was only if he didn’t consider the possibility of somebody previously loyal to him flipping. It was a lot to think about. Too much. He could put Uhura on the investigation after he figured out what to do about Nero.  
  
Reaching for a PADD, Pike sent a message to his secretary , asking her to cancel all of his appointments for the day. He only hoped that the perpetually cheerful woman (Carol? Cheryl?) would be able to mollify them and wished, not for the first time, that Uhura could just handle everything. But Uhura was too valuable to waste her talents on clerical duties, and had told him so on the one memorable occasion that he had slipped up and asked her to call the beverage supplier that the Enterprise contracted with.   
  
Pike sat there for a long time, turning his chair so that he could look out of the enormous window.  
  
The silence in the office only disturbed by the bubbling of the fountain, the occasional wheeze from the chair cushion as Pike shifted his weight. Pike sat quiet for a long time, thinking. Just because his options were severely limited didn’t mean that it was an easy choice.  
  
The suns had risen over the mountains by the time he called Uhura.  
  
\---  
  
When Jim woke up for the second time that day, it wasn’t out of the efforts of any beeping alarm or communicator alert, but the slamming of a door. At first he was confused, not sure what had finally jarred him out of sleep, but then he heard the door open and slam again.  
  
Confused, but not particularly concerned, Jim rolled out of bed. He yawned as he stretched his arms, and tried to shake the groggy feeling that had settled into him. If the amount of sunlight pouring through the curtains was anything to go by, Jim was willing to be that he’d gotten too much sleep. A quick glance at his comm. told Jim that it was almost 9:30.   
  
He rubbed the sleep from his eyes and pulled a clean pair of jeans from the laundry pile. Well, a clean _-er_ pair of jeans at least. From the looks of things, Bones had collected most of his own laundry but had left Jim’s in its customary jumble. All in all it was a bit of a dick move, but Jim couldn’t help but smile fondly. Fog of grogginess aside, Jim was feeling good as he trudged into the kitchen, excited by the prospect of spending a lazy morning with Bones.   
  
Slamming door already forgotten, Jim was feeling pretty damn great for the seven seconds it took for him to walk from the bedroom to the small dining area, and the additional heartbeat it took for him to notice the can of decaf coffee sitting on the counter.  
  
There was only one can like that in the trailer. Jim hoped, suddenly and blindly, that they had been robbed in the night. But even though the lid was off, Jim could see the wad ofcredits still shoved inside.  
  
“Well well well, look who’s finally up.” Under different circumstances, the words Bones spoke could have been lighthearted. Gruff but good-natured. Bones had said it before when Jim stumbled awake after a few too many, or slept in for hours on his one day off from working at the casino. It was usually followed by a kiss or a pinch on the ass, the easy routine after living together so long, but the cold accusation in Bones’ voice made it clear that he wanted less than nothing to do with Jim that morning.  
  
Jim tore his eyes away from the can, wondered how long he had stood there, staring at it and forgetting to breathe. He hadn’t even heard the door open, but there Bones was, leaning against the frame and looking at him like... like nothing at all. Whatever hope Jim had been holding out took a critical hit when he saw the complete lack of emotion on Bones’ face.  
  
“Bones, I-“ Jim wasn’t sure what he was going to say, how he was going to make Bones understand. He’d had a lie ready - something about gambling with his paychecks and hiding the extra cash – but really, it was just as well that Bones cut him off.  
  
“Get out of my way, Jim.” Bones brushed past him easily, moving through the kitchen and into the small living area. There was a duffel bag sitting on the couch and Jim felt the floor drop out from underneath him.  
  
“Stop it Bones, please, just let me –“ Jim’s voice was getting suspiciously desperate sounding but he didn’t care. Bones couldn’t leave. He couldn’t. Jim needed him.  
  
“Let you what, Jim? Let you get your ass thrown back in prison?” Bones grabbed the duffel bag and roughly threw the strap over his shoulder, voice furious but face still blank. “You want me to stand by while you get yourself killed?”  
  
“If you would just stop for a minute and let me explain,” Jim saw something in Bones’ eyes snap, but before Jim could flinch away, Bones had cornered him against the wall. They didn’t touch, but Jim still shrunk back, trying to fight down the panic that clawed at his throat. He didn’t think that Bones would hit him, not really, even as the other man’s hands curled into angry fists. Bones wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t.  
  
It was just that none of Jim’s previous experiences with getting backed against walls had ended particularly well.  
  
“What was the first thing I told you when you got back?” Bones must have seen something in his eyes, because Jim couldn’t help but notice the way the other man’s furious tone suddenly colored with sadness and something else that Jim didn’t want to think about. Something that sounded a lot like disgust. “I told you that I’d be gone if you got mixed up in that shit again.”  
  
“We’re not even going to talk about this?” Jim knew that Bones’ decree had been serious, but at the same time he hadn’t ever really believed it could happen. “Bones, don’t be mad. I was just -“  
  
“I don’t fucking care what you were doing. And I sure as hell don’t care why.” Bones drew away from him then, leaving Jim’s back pressed against the wall. Jim watched, helpless, as Bones moved towards the door.   
  
“I was doing it so we could get out of here! I was doing it for us!” Jim was past thinking about denying what he had been doing. If he could just get Bones to listen, to understand, to put the bag down and not walk out the door.  
  
Bones paused for a second, one hand on the door handle, looking at the floor. Jim couldn’t see his face, not really, but he could see the landslide slope of Bones’ shoulders. For a second, Jim thought that he would stay. But then Bones stood up straight, how his stance solidified with each word he spoke.  
  
“There’s no more _us,_ Jim.”  
  
Bones let the door slam shut behind him.  
  
\---  
  
Pike was still looking out at the mountains when he heard the turbolift chime, the slight sigh of air as the doors slid open. The click of Uhura’s heels as she crossed the room seemed to last forever.  
  
The anticipation did nothing to help the cold, slimy feeling that had settled into Pike’s gut. It was the same sensation he’d had when he had submitted the application to withdraw from the command track at Starfleet and start a colony, the same feeling that had curled through him when he’d discovered that one of his best friends had turned traitor. It was a feeling that Pike had come to associate with cusps, important turning points both good and bad. Whatever he decided, there would be no turning back.  
  
There was no way to win, no way to handle the situation that wouldn’t result in some type of loss. Pike had known for a long time that the blacks and whites of morality were myths at best. He just had to hope that he chose the best thing, the lesser of two evils. In a way it was Pike’s own fault that everything had turned out like it did – after all, he had been the one to get Nero involved on Iankt Prime all those years ago. Things would only get worse if he waited longer.  
  
Pike knew that he couldn’t salvage the situation, but he could at least hope to keep things from getting worse.  
  
When he turned in his chair Uhura was standing in front of his desk, arms crossed. Pike could tell that she had something important to tell him, and Uhura never disappointed.   
“I’m glad you called when you did. The tail I put on Nero just checked in, and they told me that he’s heading toward the beach. Do you want me to tell them to intercept him?”  
  
Pike took a deep breath, hoping his surprise didn’t show on his face.   
  
There was only one place near the beach that Nero would be interested in visiting. The prospect of Nero staging a repeat of his little performance the day before had been bad enough. Pike hadn’t imagined that the Romulan would strike someone so close to Pike’s business so soon.   
  
Pike’s plan to arrange a meeting with Nero and agree desist his more illegal on-planet activities disappeared. Suddenly, he found himself wondering if it had ever really been a valid plan at all. Uhura was right – Nero had to be insane. He had to be insane to force Pike’s hand the way he was, to leave Pike with no other choice. It had taken Pike hours to come to his previous conclusion, to consider all the possibilities and the potential ramifications of each, but it only took him a second to discard.   
  
Pike remembered how beautiful the landscape had looked when the suns rose mere hours before, black sands almost glowing as the colors painted the sky. He remembered how, when he had first set foot on Iankt Prime, he had seen all of the possibilities in the universe laid out before him in the craggy, un-terraformed deserts. He remembered going to visit Winona and her sons, how she threw a plate at him and chased him out of the house while the youngest watched silently from the couch with eyes had been so blue they looked chlorinated. He remembered the bodies in Nero’s room, the crime scene photos taken not even 24 hours before.  
  
“No. Call your men back and tell them to take off.” Pike slid open one of the desk’s drawers. “I have to handle this myself.”  
  
One way or another, Pike knew that he was going to get what was coming to him. He was going to get exactly what he deserved.  
  
\---  
  
 _ **Twenty Five Years Ago**  
  
Pike was standing in the shadow of the cliff, absently kicking up clouds of dust, when George arrived. The sky was a mottled bruise of purple and yellow as the suns set, and the beautiful red and green of the canyon walls looked like smears of brown in the failing light. Darkness fell quickly on Iankt Prime, and the temperature had dropped a good ten degrees in the short time that Pike had been waiting for his friend to arrive.   
  
Pike shoved his hands even deeper into the pockets of his heavy canvas jacket as George stepped out of his truck. It was futile as an effort to keep warm, but it reminded him of the phaser that was tucked into the small of his back. As if he could have forgotten. Its presence was like a hot brand, festering against his skin in a constant reminder of his purpose.  
  
“Hey Chris” George said as he slammed the door of the truck, blowing hot air on his hands as he made his way over to the cliff where they had met so many times before, planned the future of the planet together. “Where’s everybody else? I thought we were having a meeting.”  
  
Pike stared at him, face passive and blank. It was a look that he had been practicing in the mirror for days, expertly crafted to hide the thunderstorm of emotions that threatened to overwhelm him.   
  
“Chris?” George didn’t sound guilty, didn’t sound like he was worried as he stopped only a few feet from away Pike, looking at him with an amused concern. Fucking bastard.  
  
“I hope you at least struggled with it, George.” Pike said, his voice dark and furious “I hope it didn’t come easy.”  
  
“What are you talking about Chris? What is this?” George sounded confused, taking a hesitant step backwards.  
  
“You fucking well know what this is!” Pike felt his control slipping as took his hands out of his pockets, moving away from the cliff and stalking towards his lying Judas of a friend “What did they promise you? Money? Please tell me you didn’t do it for a free pass off this rock, give me that at least.”  
  
“Listen, I don’t know what – “   
  
“You’ve been snitching to the Federation!” His carefully rehearsed speech abandoned him as he looked into George’s open, honest, traitorous face. “I know it was you, George!”  
  
“You’re fucking nuts, Pike!” George was yelling now, backing away in short measured steps as he judged the distance to the safety of his car. Pike realized, then, that George was going to try and make a run for it, that there was no going back.  
  
“What did you tell them?” Pike pulled his phaser and trained it on George. Everything slowed down, and in that one eternal second Pike saw everything from the slight sheen of sweat that had broken out on George’s forehead to the almost imperceptible tremor of his own hands as he fought to hold the phaser steady. The air temperature was still dropping steadily, but Pike felt like he was burning alive. “What the fuck did you tell them?”  
  
George changed trajectories suddenly. Before Pike could take the shot George was lunging towards him, face tight with unmasked fear and determination. Pike pulled the trigger a second too late, his shot arching wide into the side of the cliff as George tackled him. The phaser was knocked from his hands as he and George stumbled into the black sand, still so hot from the blistering afternoon sun.   
  
The fight was short and brutal. George swept Pike’s legs from under him and Pike grabbed the shoulders of his jacket, snarling with rage. George was strong with desperation and fear but Pike had the advantage of size, of experience, and he rolled George underneath him as he fell. He had meant this to be clean, to be quick, but his phaser was too far away to reach and Pike clamped his hands around George’s throat.  
  
Pike had been preparing himself to kill George from a respectable distance, to shoot him in the chest or in his traitorous back if George tried to run. He had thought that George would fall over instantly like they always did in the holovids, had assured himself that it would be easy. While Pike had been in his fair share of fights, nothing could have prepared him for what it felt like to hold another person’s life in his bare hands, to squeeze mercilessly and do his best to extinguish it by force.  
  
He remembered the first time he had met George, how they had laid plans for the colony together, bright-eyed and young and unstoppable. He remembered being the best man at George’s wedding, making a toast to his future with Winona, remembered the look of pure joy in George’s eyes a month before when he told Christopher that she was pregnant for the second time. He remembered the call that he had received the night before, how he had felt when he learned that it was George Kirk who had turned traitor. Pike had expected Komack, maybe, but never George.  
  
The suns sat on the rim of the horizon, twin balls of fire that set the sky ablaze with dying light. It was near freezing already and Pike could see the cold clouds of his breath as he panted, struggling to keep control. Despite the dropping temperature the sand beneath them simmered with a hateful heat, burning Pike’s knees as he looked out towards the horizon, squinted his eyes against the orange glow of the suns.  
  
He grit his teeth as George struggled, bucking underneath him, tearing at his clothes and his hands, choking and gasping and making inhuman guttural sounds as Pike tightened his grip. George was young and strong and he was fighting for his life, but Pike bore down harder and ;slowly, so slowly, George’s struggles weakened, his body convulsing one last time before slowly going limp. His hands fell away from where they had been trying to pry Pike’s fingers from his throat, and Pike looked at those hands as George slowly stopped struggling, how they twitched and drew random, frantic patterns in the sand.   
  
It was over. Pike’s face was a mess of snot and tears as he stumbled away from George’s motionless body and vomited violently into the fine black sand, his chest heaving as he took great whooping breaths of air. He felt like he was going to collapse from exhaustion. He felt like he could have run a marathon.  
  
George Kirk was the first man that Christopher Pike ever killed. Pike had to strangle him for eleven minutes.  
  
Standing over the corpse of what had been his best friend, Pike had sworn to himself that he would never kill somebody again. At the time, he actually believed the lie._  
  
\---  
  
No sooner had Bones pulled away, fan belt squealing somewhere in the engine of the shitty little car, than Jim had hit the booze. Well, he had tried to at least.  
  
Mind blank, running almost on autopilot, Jim had walked past the condemning can on the counter. He wasn’t thinking about it, wasn’t thinking about anything. He was thinking of nothing except, maybe, about getting shitfaced and going on a drunk-dialing spree from the discomfort of the trailer’s couch.   
The whole thing had seemed somehow unreal, a bad dream that couldn’t possibly be reality, until he opened the cabinet where they’d always kept the booze.  
  
Then Jim had laughed. He’d laughed so hard that he had to sit down on the linoleum floor, gasping for air and trying to wipe the water from his cheeks. He’d laughed even as he’d held his head in his hands and tried to keep the desperate, increasingly hysterical sounds from escaping.   
  
He’d laughed until he choked on it.  
  
Bones had taken every drop of alcohol with him. Jim figured that he’d probably stuffed the bottles into the duffel bag next to his clothes and his PADDs and the holo of him and Jocelyn that had sat on the shelf above the sink. It was such a Bones thing to do, and it made Jim hurt at the very core of himself.  
  
Time seemed to pass with infinite slowness while Jim sat on the floor, head alternately in his hands or tilted back against the cabinets to look up at the window. But when he stood up, he saw that over an hour had passed since he had woken up and watched Bones walk out of his life and no. Jim was steadfastly _not_ thinking about what had happened and how he had no one to blame but himself.   
  
In fact, all he was thinking about was the nearest liquor store, and whether or not he thought he could walk there and back without getting heat sick. He needed a drink. Badly. He had a can full of credits and an empty trailer and when you calculated it all out then yeah, he was willing to make the walk despite the flat, baking heat. He reasoned that at least if he got sunstroke then they would take him to the hospital and he would get to see Bones.  
  
Jim hoped that Spock would be proud of his logical thinking.  
  
He’d made it about half way when a familiar car crested the rise of the hill in front of him. For a minute Jim had thought that he was hallucinating, that perhaps the heat had finally melted his mind. The car slowed as it approached and pulled to the side of the road next to him, one tinted window rolling down to reveal Spock – calm and pressed as always – sitting behind the wheel.  
  
“Mr. Kirk, are you unwell?” Spock asked.  
  
“No.” Jim said “Everything’s great.” As if it was standard operating procedure to walk along the side of the road in the middle of the day. That earned him a raised eyebrow, but Jim was a little too numb to gloat over the small personal victory. Instead, he just got in the car when Spock asked him to and kept his mouth shut as he basked in the wonder of air conditioning.  
  
As it turned out, Spock had been trying to comm. him for the past half hour. Scotty apparently wanted them to take care of some business on the spacedock for a week while the heat from the homicide investigation faded. Not that Spock had said so directly, but Jim could read between the lines.   
  
Jim realized half way to Scotty’ restaurant that he couldn’t remember whether or not he’d locked the front door of the trailer, but chased the thought away. It wasn’t like it really mattered, like he had anything worth stealing. And wasn’t it convenient, that Bones had walked out right before Jim was told that he had to lay low and go on a weeklong field trip. It was perfect, Jim thought acidly. Just fucking perfect.  
  
Jim took a deep breath and forced the thought away. He had other things to take care of. The memory of Bones taking off without so much as a goodbye would just have to fester in his hindbrain until Jim found the cheapest bar on the spacedock.  
  
Spock skirted the edge of town, maneuvering effortlessly through the scattered midday traffic. Jim was uncharacteristically thankful for the lack of conversation. The very idea of making small talk caused the bile to rise is his throat. Instead of trying to fill the silence, he rested his chin in his hand and stared out the tinted window, watching as the dilapidated buildings blurred by and gave way to slightly nicer areas as they neared the beach.  
  
It was lunch time when they reached the restaurant, but the parking lot of Scotty’s was as vacant as ever. Jim had never seen more than a handful of cars parked in front of the diner, but the expanse of barren asphalt was somehow unnerving. In fact, the only other vehicle was Scotty’s sleek red hovercar, parked in its customary spot in the southwest corner of the lot. Spock didn’t bother with any such polite formalities, and swung into the spot closest to the door, close enough so that Jim could see the red _CLOSED_ sign hanging in the window of the restaurant.  
  
The sign may have said that the diner was closed, but Spock pushed the door open without effort and Jim followed him into the blasting air conditioning, hands shoved in the back pockets of his jeans. Pavel stood at the console next to the door, wrapping silverware in napkins with a practiced ease, pale and drawn. He looked up briefly when Jim and Spock entered, an awkward jerk of the head, before returning his attention to the task at hand. The smell of burning tickled Jim’s nose as he passed Pavel but he ignored it. Not his business.  
  
Scotty sat at a table not far from the door, partially obscured by the plain black briefcase that sat on the surface in front of him, lid open. Jim could see where his tongue had caught between his teeth, as Scotty looked intently at whatever the briefcase held. Jim couldn’t see what was inside the case. Found that he didn’t particularly care. He just wanted to be gone. Scotty made the universal wait-a-minute gesture with the hand that wasn’t busy jabbing at the screen of his PADD.  
  
Jim wasn’t sure if he felt relieved or annoyed at having to wait - his emotions and the whole concept of ‘feeling things’ were pretty much a wreck – but he realized that he did have to pee. Badly. He left Spock standing stiffly with his hands behind his back and made his towards the bathroom.  
  
“Toilet’s broken.” Scotty said, voice carrying easily in the quiet room. “We’ve making the customers use the public one. Down by the parking lot.”  
  
Jim paused with his hand on the doorknob, looked back over his shoulder to where the other man was still staring intently into the briefcase. As he watched, Scotty shut the lid, turned to him and grinned at him, friendly and genuine. Jim smiled back, cringing inwardly at how fake it felt. He liked Scotty, he really did, but the last thing he wanted to do was explain why he was in a bad mood.  
  
Either Scotty didn’t notice the forced quality of Jim’s expression or he misattributed it to the idea of having to hike down to the grimy public restroom, because he added  
  
“Just go out back.” Scotty made a vague hand gesture in the direction of the kitchen “Door’s behind the cooler.”  
  
Jim picked his way through the small, spotless kitchen. The fryers and ovens were cold and silent, and he could hear the distant sound of Scotty chatting with Spock in the dining room (well, more like chatting _at_ Spock) and the faint grumbling of the air handler. He finally found the door right where Scotty said he would, partially obscured behind a large freezer – there was just enough room to crack it open and slip out into the back lot of the restaurant. A wave of boiling air assaulted him the moment the door opened, but after the too-cool interior of the restaurant it was almost a relief. The door clicked shut behind him, effectively silencing the faint murmur of Spock and Scotty’s conversation, and the last thing Jim heard was the loud crash of a tub of silverware being dropped on a tiled floor.   
  
Jim rolled his shoulders against the dry, beating heat, and pissed into the pebbly sand, staring at the scrubby shore plants that encircled the back lot without really seeing them. He tucked himself away and cracked his knuckles. Cracked his neck. Scratched at his shoulder blade. The thought of making small talk with anybody, even Scotty, was more than he could take at that moment, so Jim kicked at the dirt and counted crumpled soda cans and wasted time until turning with a sigh and headed back through the kitchen and into the restaurant.  
  
\---   
  
By the time Sulu finished his shift, he had all but forgotten about picking Pavel up from work. He’d ended up pulling an hour of overtime after a depressed Deltan with a mountain of gambling debts had taken a long walk off of a short roof while on lunch break. Sulu, who had been up since two in the morning and was running on fumes, had been put on crowd control until the thing that had once been a body but was now just meat had been scraped off of the sidewalk and into a body bag.  
  
Suicides were never easy to deal with, and by the time Sulu was given the okay to leave he wanted nothing more than to scrub the grime of the day from his body and sleep forever. It wasn’t until he was sitting at the stoplight a block away from his apartment, trying to figure out what he was going to do about the situation with Pavel, that he remembered his promise to give the younger man a ride.   
  
He considered blowing Pavel off, going home and zoning out and disappearing from Pavel’s life. Because as much as he wanted to help Pavel, to be there for him, to somehow fix him, the thought of ending it like that was tantalizingly easy. Hell, he’d probably never have to see Pavel again until the day when his car’s comm bleeped and told him to report to the site of a suspected overdose.  
  
The black plastic of the steering wheel was hot against his forehead. When the car behind him honked impatiently, three quick blasts that let him know the light had changed, Sulu raised his head and pulled into the turn lane and turned back towards the beach.  
  
\---  
  
Neatly wrapped bundled of forks and knives were scattered across the floor, not entirely unlike how Jim had pictured when he’s heard the clatter as he walked outside. That was where the similarities stopped. For a moment Jim simply could not process what he was seeing, and for the second time in as many days, Jim felt like he had walked out of reality and straight into a nightmare.  
  
Pavel knelt on the floor a few steps away from the overturned bin, awash in a sea of red. The spreading pool of blood channeled in the grout between the floor tiles, soaked and stained the once white napkins that wrapped the silverware. Jim could only see Pavel in profile, but it was more than enough. The young man’s mouth was a silent O of pain and shock and he had his blood-slick hands pressed to the tear in his shirt, the rip in his stomach, trembling as he tried to keep his intestines from spilling out onto the floor.  
  
Scotty lay sprawled backwards over a table, his head hanging off the edge closest to Jim. Blood bubbled up from his nose and cut wet tracks across his cheekbones, collecting in small pools in the corners of his blank, open eyes. Aside from the jerky rising and falling of his chest, Scotty didn’t move. One of his arms was twisted at several unnatural angles, but the hand at the end was still curled loosely around the grip of what Jim recognized as a highly illegal type of concussive phaser.  
  
That, at least, explained the wide swath of green gore that decorated the once beige and inoffensive curtains of the restaurant. It also explained the mostly headless body that slumped in a lifeless heap on the tile. What it didn’t explain was why Spock was laying curled on the floor with his back to Jim, spasming quietly. There was so much green blood splattered from the decapitated body that Jim couldn’t tell if Spock was bleeding or dying or what, and fear filled him like molten metal. Pavel’s injury wasn’t necessarily a death sentence, and at least Scotty and Spock looked like they were still breathing, but Jim knew that he needed to get help, to get them to a hospital as soon as possible. He’d left his comm back in the trailer, but Scotty had to have one in his office and -   
  
Too bad that nothing in Jim’s life was ever that easy.  
  
Standing over Scotty was a tall Romulan holding a blade. He had been staring intently at Scotty, scrawling the tip of the knife lightly along the incapacitated man’s collarbones, but he looked up when Jim entered. Some faraway part of Jim’s mind wondered clinically at the facial tattoos but then the Romulan shifted towards Jim, adjusted his grip on the weapon. The blade was long and thin and bright with blood, but the alien who wielded it was alarmingly clean. Except for a smattering of green droplets that decorated the right side of his tattooed face and ruined ear, the Romulan looked just like he’d waltzed out of a business meeting.  
  
“Ah, here’s the other one” the Romulan said, unaccented standard, talking to Jim like they were old friends. “Come over here, son.” He grinned around a mouth of broken teeth and took a step towards Jim.  
  
Jim’s paralysis broke and he stepped backwards, started to shift into a defensive posture, but he saw the flash of movement in the corner of his eye too late. A second Romulan (well, third if you counted the dead one on the floor) came out of his blind spot and knocked him to the side with an effortless slap. _Romulans_ a helpful, hateful part of his mind supplied _are many times stronger than humans_. He rolled, spat blood, and came up in a crouch to see the second Romulan, the one with the arrow tattoo, was advancing while the other stood back and fondled his knife. Weird.  
  
Jim had been in his fair share of fights, but it was all he could do to deflect the blows as Arrow Tattoo drove him backwards towards a row of booths. Somewhere, beneath the harsh sounds of his own breathing and the pounding of blood in his ears, he heard Pavel whimper in pain. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the Romulan with the knife take a few leisurely steps to the side. Aware that he was about to be cornered, he dropped to duck a blow and hooked his ankle around the leg of a chair, whipped it forward to catch Arrow Tattoo by surprise. The chair fractured, raining debris, and Jim surged forward to catch the Romulan off guard. It was a lot like shoving concrete, but Jim still managed to slide by.  
  
He brought his hands up to deflect the knife he was sure was coming, and Jim had just enough time to realize how badly he had misjudged the situation before the fist connected solidly with his stomach. A solid wall of pain sent Jim crashing to his knees, gasping for air, and before he could recover a pair of hands pinned his wrists behind his back. Another hand carded though his hair, the touch oddly gently for the briefest of moments before the hand tightened and pulled, wrenching him upward by the roots.  
  
They had been forced to keep their hair cut short on Tantalus. Ostensibly for health reasons, Jim had discovered during his first week on the penal colony that the buzzcuts served double duty in preventing enemies from having an easy handhold. Regardless, he had grown it out when he’d returned to Iankt Prime – Bones liked his hair, and, after all, Jim had assumed that those days of fighting for his life were behind him.  
  
Jim didn’t go easily as he was pulled to his feet, jerking and thrashing as even more adrenaline dumped into his blood, taking whooping breaths of air as his diaphragm spasmed. Jim Kirk was young and strong and he had fought for his life before. Even in his winded state he could have probably thrown off a human enemy, but the Romulans holding Jim seemed less than phased by his efforts, the one that had pinned his hands going so far as to chuckle darkly, damp breath scalding on Jim’s neck. Jim’s breath caught in his throat, and he considered yelling for the briefest of moments before dismissing the thought.  
  
Whatever the Romulans were planning to do to him, to Scotty and Spock and Pavel, there was nobody around to hear them scream.  
  
The realization caused Jim to renew his struggles, mutely resisting until he felt the long edge of the blade press firmly against his neck. He stilled, eyes wide, and drew rapid breaths through his nose as the tip of the knife teased along the pounding pulse in his throat. He looked into the face of the Romulan that gripped his hair for a split second before making a concentrated effort to look everywhere except those eyes, wide and sincere and insane as he stared clinically at Jim.  
  
“That’s no way to behave.” The Romulan said, breath acrid in Jim’s face “I’m not here to hurt you.”  
  
Jim sincerely doubted that. In fact, of all the lies Jim had heard in his life, it had to be one of the most blatant.   
  
The Romulan was close enough that Jim could see the line of pinprick scars that haloed his head, the way his eyelashes fluttered as he looked, no longer at Jim, but at the tip of his knife and the patterns it followed as it traveled from Jim’s throat to trace along his cheek. Jim clenched his jaw and made a low, animal noise when he felt it tickle at the corner of his eye.  
  
“I want to talk to you about your future.”  
  
\---  
  
Sulu drove slowly, distracted, and got caught at almost every stoplight. He didn’t bother to be irritated, not even when other most of the other vehicles on the road automatically decreased their speeds at his approach. A single glimpse of the silent sirens on Sulu’s roof, the knowledge of what they promised, was enough to slow the traffic surrounding his squad car to what seemed like a glacial pace.   
  
He hummed along to an old song that wasn’t on the radio, tuneless and loud in the quiet interior of the car, and stared at the unblinking red eye of the stoplight, waiting for it to change.  
  
Almost half an hour late, Sulu pulled into the parking lot of the restaurant where Pavel worked. He turned off the engine and stepped out into the baking heat, feeling his skin tighten in the dry air. It wasn’t the best parking job, and if Sulu would have been careless he could have easily dinged the door of the car parked next to his, a dark tinted rental, the type of low-riding vehicle that only assholes drove. Sulu hadn’t been expecting to have to park next to anyone – the small lot had always been empty when he’d come in the past, and anyways, Pavel always stood outside when Sulu came to pick him up.  
  
The doors of his cruiser locked with a cheerful beeping noise and Sulu crossed the simmering asphalt with his hands shoved in the pockets of his uniform, an oddly juvenile pose. He had his hand on the doorknob of the restaurant and was pushing inward when he heard the scream. It was too late to stop the motion, the halt his forward momentum, but Sulu had just enough time to pull the phaser from the holster on his belt before the door swung wide and he was inside the restaurant.   
  
He couldn’t do anything more than watch, stunned, as Jim Kirk – who had been a junior when Sulu was a freshman, who had always looked cool and untouchable in his leather jacket even when the heat had been in the triple digits, who had dropped out quietly without a word to anyone a month before graduation – screamed again, his right eye disappearing in a raw blossom of red.  
  
Sulu recognized Nero from months spent memorizing Pike’s file. Starfleet didn’t have anything so crass as a _Most Wanted_ list, but should it have existed, the heavily tattooed Romulan would hovered somewhere around #12. Sulu’s superiors had told him that he would be unlikely to encounter Nero, that his infiltration wouldn’t be likely to expose him to the higher-ups in the criminal organization that Pike dealt with. Sulu’s superiors had also told him that it was advisable to cultivate old relationships in order to make himself seem integrated into the community. They obviously didn’t know jack shit.  
  
It was almost too easy for Sulu to fall into cop mode, holding his phaser at the ready as he advanced into the restaurant as if this were another routine call, as if Jim Kirk wasn’t crying out hoarsely with blood running into his mouth, Pavel nowhere to be seen.  
  
“Drop your weapon!”   
  
Both of the Romulans looked up when Sulu shouted the command, but neither made an effort to follow the order.  
  
Sulu kept his eyes trained on the assailants, watching for sudden movements as he took another step forward. Later, Sulu wouldn’t be able to understand how he had made such a stupid mistake, but in the heat of the moment his world had narrowed to include nothing more than the sight on his phaser and the Romulans in front of him and he hadn’t even thought to look at the floor before he set his foot down in the pool of blood, slippery on the tile, and felt the world slide out from underneath him.  
  
Sulu squeezed off a shot as he fell, the phaser blast meant for Nero going wide and catching the other Romulan, the one that held Jim’s hands behind his back, in the head. If Sulu wouldn’t have been falling backwards into a bright sea of blood he probably would have reflected on how good of a shot it was, how lucky he had been. A few inches lower and it would have been Jim Kirk slumping backwards with a smoking hole in his skull. As it was, Sulu had no time to think before he was on his back, staring up at the particle board ceiling as his uniform shirt and the hair on the back of his head were soaked through with warmth, wet and sticky against his skin.   
  
Sulu knew that he didn’t have the luxury of getting to stop and be horrified by what was happening to him, as he rolled to stand and planted his free hand against the tile in the warm red puddle. He knew that he had to contain the situation, assess injuries, call for back-up. He knew the procedure to follow, knew that he was running out of time before he would feel the shot in his back or the cold metal of the knife against his throat, but when his eyes found Pavel, Sulu couldn’t move. Not even to breathe. He could hear Jim calling out, somewhere, far away, and Sulu thought that he could hear booted footsteps approaching him from behind, but he couldn’t react, couldn’t look away from Pavel’s slack face, the ropey pink and purple intestines that glistened with fresh blood where they spilled from the jagged slice on his abdomen.   
  
Then, without warning, the world went bright and Sulu jackknifed back down onto the tile as hundreds of thousands of volts of electricity coursed through his body. It was nothing like the shock he’d had to endure as part of his training at the Academy, completely unlike the hymns of pain that had reverberated across his neurons and left him spasming on the floor. Romulan shock weapons obviously weren’t designed for human physiology, but Sulu wasn’t coherent enough to worry about permanent neurological damage.  
  
Soaked in _~~Pavel’s blood~~_ blood that wasn’t his, cheek pressed to the slippery floor, Sulu though that he was breathing but he couldn’t be sure. Every muscle in his body was clenched tight with fiery pain, a throbbing sensation that left him feeling both far away and too, too close.   
  
Moments later, he felt a strong, inhuman hand pry his fingers from where the electricity had caused them to clench tight around the grip of his regulation phaser. The weapon removed, Sulu’s hand clenched shut again of its own volition as his body continued to ignore his desperate pleas to move. He couldn’t turn his head to look when he felt the tip of a boot wedge itself under his ribs and roll his useless body onto it’s back, couldn’t blink as he lay staring up at the ceiling tiles and Nero’s looming figure standing over him, back-lit and haloed by the harsh overhead lights of the restaurant.  
  
Sulu didn’t know what to expect, other than a slow and painful death, and was caught off guard when Nero said “I have no business with you, Officer. You can go now.”   
  
Body still immobile, Sulu was helpless to do anything but watch as Nero lifted the phaser and trained it on his head. Sulu imagined that he could see the muscles in the Romulan’s finger tightening, infinitely slowly, as Nero squeezed the trigger. He knew suddenly and with an unquestionable certainty that he was going to die there, soaked in Pavel’s blood, unable to do anything more than watch helplessly as his life was taken. At least Nero seemed content to make his death quick, instead of prolonging it in an unending agony of metal and flayed flesh.  
  
Sulu wished that he could close his eyes.  
  
He couldn’t do anything other than watch as Nero squeezed the trigger of the phaser, that infinite moment, but before that last, most crucial pound of pressure could be applied there was a crash. Sulu couldn’t be sure, couldn’t move to see, but it sounded a lot like the door of the restaurant had just been kicked inward. From his place on the floor, Sulu watched as the phaser that had been trained on his head swung up towards some unseen figure as Nero’s attentions were redirected.  
  
“Traitors and sons of traitors,” Nero said. Sulu heard the words very clearly the moment before he registered a faint flash of light from the direction of the door. Then another flash, a split second after the first.  
  
Nero’s chest disintegrated, bits of bone and chunks of flesh and a spray of blood that exploded outward. The Romulan looked stunned, furious, but then he didn’t look like anything at all as the second shot caught him in the head, turning it into nothing more than a cloud of gore that rained particles of grey and white and green.  
  
It was only then that Sulu heard the sound of the gunshots, an echoing of twin shuddering un-sounds that seemed to tear apart the very air itself as Nero’s body collapsed gracelessly on Sulu’s feet.


	6. Aftermath

In addition to funding the colony’s schools and law enforcement, the Enterprise Hotel and Casino contributed a significant amount of its profits to the Iankt Prime’s various hospitals and clinics. The medical facilities were state of the art, staffed with certified medical professionals who knew what they were doing. It was nothing like the early days of the colony, when Pike had been forced to learn to do old-fashioned stitches on the back of Gretchen’s calf after all their dermal regenerators had died.

Pike had known, logically, that any hospital in the colony would probably have been adequately equipped to handle the cavalcade of injuries he was suddenly faced with, standing in the door of Scotty’s, gun still smoking in his hand. 

He had known it. Logically.

But then he was kneeling, trying to rearrange the insides of some skinny kid who looked like he was still in high school, blood slicking up the sleeves of his once-white shirt and soaking the knees of his pants, too much blood, while he tried to keep an eye on Hikaru Sulu who remained immobile, staring unblinking at the ceiling, covered in gore, and tried to tell if Scotty was unconscious or dead ,and yelled at Jim Kirk to keep pressure on that eye and Jesus fucking Christ, what were Kirk and Sulu even doing there?

So yeah, he had known logically that Cochrane Memorial had newly retrofitted ambulance shuttles, but Pike called Uhura on his hands-free comm, ordered her to get them beamed up to the spacedock’s medical center as quickly as possible. It was one of their contingency plans, quicker than any shuttle in case of a certain type of emergency. If anything qualified as an emergency, Pike thought bitterly, it was this. 

They arrived in a swirling clouds of atoms on the transporter room pad, and Pike barely had time to take a breath before a pack of medics in white garb descended upon them, pulled him away from the eviscerated kid, shuffled him to the side after discerning that he was uninjured.

Pike stayed out of the way after that. He sat in the waiting room for a long time, packed in-between a Lieutenant with bad food poisoning and a couple of traders who were still bleeding sluggishly from where they had sliced at each other with broken bottles but had since become enamored with showing each other pictures of their children. Pike sat, and he looked at the blood on his sleeves and the scratches on the linoleum and the thick metal door that separated the waiting area from the emergency room itself.

He must have sat there for over an hour, but the only person he saw go through those doors was an extremely harried looking man with a hell of a Southern accent. Pike had watched, torn between amusement and sympathy, as the man had burst into the waiting room, claimed to be a doctor, and had somehow managed to persuade the old battleaxe of a nurse at the intake desk that he, and only he had the full list of allergies of one of the current patients.

Pike figured that he probably could have gotten behind those doors with a few comm calls, but he didn’t try. As much as he wanted to know the status of the others and whether or not they were going to make it, he couldn’t bring himself to move. The sounds and the images of the room coursed passed him too quickly to be fully registered or understood, the rushing waters that parted around the boulder in the middle of the stream.

He sat like that until Uhura arrived. Somehow, Pike wasn’t surprised when she walked out of the secure medical area instead of in through the sliding doors that connected the hospital to the rest of the spacedock. He hadn’t seen her go in, but that meant absolutely nothing. The woman had her ways.

Pike stood when he saw her, a motion that seemed to set off another fit of vomiting from the Lieutenant next to him. Uhura stared at him for a moment, face inscrutable, and Pike waited awkwardly, his arms held uncomfortably by his sides, until Uhura nodded and turned. She waited for him to catch up before she led him through the entryway and into the organized chaos of the emergency room, past a nurse’s station and in between automated carts of supplies, until they reached a room marked 107b in glowing red letters. 

Pike faltered at the door of the biobay, unnoticed as he silently observed the room’s occupants. Four of six biobeds in the heptagonal room were occupied, and the room seemed to be a hub of purposeful activity. There was nothing that he could do or say, not really, and his initial impulse to try and be supportive was overruled by the irrefutable knowledge that he was responsible, personally responsible for everything that had happened to the injured. His presence would probably be less appriciated than Nero's. Uhura waited for a moment before she guided him gently to the side, out of the flow of medical traffic, and filled him in.

Sulu, Scotty and Spock had all been incapacitated by the same Romulan shock weapon. When Pike asked her how the doctors had been able to tell, Uhura said something about patterned disruption of bioelectric impulses that went about a mile over Pike’s head. The point was that, for the most part, they were going to be okay..

Sulu was fine, the least physically injured of the group, already up and sitting by the bed of the kid whose blood was all over Pike’s shirt. Uhura told him that the kid's name was Pavel, and that he was going to pull through fine now that he’d had about two and a half liters of blood pumped back into him. The knife wound had been relatively shallow. Not meant to kill instantaneously, easy enough to heal with a few rounds of tissue regeneration if medical attention could be gotten in time. Pike knew that Nero hadn’t intended for anybody in that restaurant to survive to get medical treatment.

Scotty’s shoulder and elbow joints were in the process of being rebuilt from the marrow out, but he was going to be almost as good as new once he woke up.

Spock was in significantly worse shape. Stable, but comatose. Uhura told Pike that that the shock weapon had affected Spock differently due to his Vulcan physiology. He was breathing, and scanners were picking up brain activity, but they were going to have to bring in a telepathic healer.

Uhura looked a little wild around the eyes when she said that, and Pike - who had no idea who Spock was - tried to nod supportively.

Jim Kirk had lost his eye. The doctors were waiting until Jim woke up to discuss cybernetic replacement options - Kirk had required sedation after a particularly nasty allergic reaction to a painkiller had caused him to hallucinate violently. It turned out that the irate Southern doctor had been right about that list of allergies, although that didn’t quite explain why he was hovering over Kirk’s bed and glowering at anyone who made the mistake of walking past. 

Pike nodded after Uhura finished, and the moment of silence that stretched between them was punctuated only by the beeping of machines and an indecipherable announcement on the hospital intercom. Pike realized belatedly that he was probably wanted planetside. The police were going to need a statement. But when he mentioned it to Uhura, she shook her head.

“It’s already been taken care of.” she said, before pressing a bag of clothes into his hands and telling him to go change. 

“Former Governor Pike, hero of the people” Uhura continued, flashing him a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “The news station wants an interview. It’ll probably get picked up by one of the major Federation networks, so be convincing.”

Pike opened his mouth to ask what the hell she meant ‘hero of the people,’ but Uhura didn’t let him get a word in edgewise.

“There’s a shuttle waiting for you in Bay 3 when you’re ready to head back to the surface. You can read all about what happened to you on the way down. This is probably going to get big, so I suggest you study your statement carefully and try to look decent.” She gave him another tightlipped smile before disappearing back into the biobay.

Gripping the bag that Uhura had handed to him, Pike left the hospital and headed in the opposite direction of the shuttle bays. He wasn’t sure where he was going, but it became apparent almost immediately that he was going to have to change out of his bloodsoaked clothes if he planned to keep walking around the spackdock in polite company. If the looks he was getting were anything to go by, Pike was only a few minutes away from being cuffed and thrown out an airlock for disturbing the peace.

He ducked into a small bathroom, and while Pike had been expecting a large bathroom with multiple stalls, he found himself in a small, single-person type of deal that was surprisingly clean. Hell, there was even a little porthole that looked out into space, although it could have easily been an image projection. It was also clearly not designed for humans – instead of a toilet, there was a foot long tube that jutted out of the wall at shoulder height. 

Pike tried not to think about it. At least it made a convenient place to hang the bag of clothes.

The door locked automatically behind him, and Pike before stripping off his soiled clothes with grim efficiency, piling them in a corner before he attempted to shove his forearms under the sonic sink. The result was far from perfect - when Pike withdrew his tingling arms he could still see where the brown of the drying blood had discolored his skin. He knew realistically that no one would be able to see it beneath his sleeves, but Pike knew that he would be able to feel it long after he had washed it off.

When he looked up to retrieve the fresh clothes Uhura had given him, Pike’s eyes were drawn to the small porthole. He wondered what it was that had caught his attention at first, but as he watched, the image flickered briefly. Definitely a hologram. 

The image showed Iankt Prime, its black continents and blue ocean. Pike could see, faintly, the sprawling colony that really was visible from the spackdock’s actual windows at all times, as the station maintained its geosynchronous orbit. Hand resting on the wall, Pike watched for a long time as the flickering of the hologram intensified. He could hear his own heart beating loudly, the blood throbbing in his ears, and felt the gooseflesh prickle on his arms. 

He needed to put clothes on. He needed to go to Bay 3 and get on the shuttle. He needed to return to the colony and reassume his responsibilities, to deal with the press and the police and whoever among his ranks had turned traitor. But Pike found that he could do none of those things, as he was entranced by the fading image in the false window. 

Pike had done the right thing. He had tried to do the right thing for the colony,the future of the planet. His planet. That flickered and dissolved into a snow of static nothingness while he watched, standing alone in his underwear in the spacedock bathroom, helpless to look away.


End file.
